BRIEF DESCRIPTION: The fruiting body of Amanita exitialis is small to medium-sized. The cap is 40 - 70 mm wide, convex to applanate, sometimes slightly depressed at center, glabrous, white, and sometimes cream-colored over disc. Its margin is nonstriate and nonappendiculate, and the flesh is white.

The gills are free, white to whitish, and crowded; the short gills are attenuate, plentiful, and in 2 - 3 ranks.

The stem is 70 - 90 x 5 - 10 mm, white to whitish, glabrous, or sometimes with fibrillose squamules, and subcylindric or slightly tapering upward. The apex is slightly expanded, and the flesh is white. The stem's basal bulb is subglobose and 10 - 20 mm wide. The volva is on the bulb as a short, membranous limb. It is thin and membranous, and the free limb is up to 7 mm high, inner and outer surfaces of the limb are white. The annulus is apical to subapical, thin, membranous, white, skirt-like, and often persistent (although it may be torn from stem during expansion of cap).

All parts of A. exitialis become yellow when wetted with dilute KOH solution.

The spores measure (9.0-) 9.5 - 12.0 (-14.5) x (8.5-) 9.0 - 11.5 (-13.0) µm and are globose to subglobose (rarely broadly ellipsoid) and amyloid. Clamps are absent from the bases of basidia. Unlike most other agarics, the basidia of this species are almost entirely 2-spored (rarely 1-spored).

This mushroom grows in broad-leaved forest.  One woody plant with which it is proposed to be symbiotic is Castanopsis fissa (Zhang et al., 2005).

The present species was described from southern China where it is known only from Guangdong Province.

The present species is deadly POISONOUS.  In mid-March of 2000, a disaster happened in Guangzhou, southern China (Guangdong Prov.) due to eating this mushroom. Nine persons ate the mushroom, only one of them survived.

The species may be compared with the North American A. bisporigera G. F. Atk., another two-spored, deadly species of Amanita sect. Phalloideae. -- Zhu L. Yang

The reader may also wish to refer to A. virosa (Fr.) Bertillon in DeChambre. -- eds.