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Microscopy spores Psilocybe Cubensis - Take Mountain

Psilocybe cubensis

Take Mountain

A Thai mountain collection with a real name behind it: ethnomycologist John Allen, a single wild mushroom near a buffalo-manure shed, and a strain so quiet most of the hobby has never heard of it.

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Sold for microscopy, taxonomy and collecting only. Not for cultivation.

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The short version

Take Mountain (more often spelled Tak Mountain) is a Thai Psilocybe cubensis line tied to the well-known ethnomycologist John W. Allen, reportedly grown from a single wild mushroom found in Tak Province in northern Thailand. It is a plain, fully pigmented cubensis with wide pale caps and a normal dark purple-brown spore drop. Genuinely obscure rather than famous, it is a quietly historic collector's piece for anyone who likes a documented backstory.

Straight talk

Fact vs. legend

There is a lot of folklore around this strain. Here is which bits are real, side by side.

What we actually know

It is a plain Psilocybe cubensis, not a hybrid and not a separate species. A cube is a cube.
It is a Thai line, tied by most accounts to ethnomycologist John W. Allen, known as Mushroom John, who brought many wild Southeast Asian cubensis collections into circulation.
The name traces to Tak Province in northern Thailand, where the founding mushroom was reportedly collected near Taksin Maharat National Park. It is sometimes catalogued under the longer label TMNF, said to stand for Taksinmaharat National Forest.
Young fruitbodies are described as caramel-to-rust-brown with fine pale speckling, opening to wide, pale, saucer-flat caps on thick white stipes.
Its spore print is the standard cubensis dark purple-brown. The pigment is normal, so this is not an albino or leucistic line.
It is genuinely uncommon. Even long-time forum regulars have reported never coming across it, so circulating material is scarce.

What the community says

The story goes that John Allen found the founding specimen on 1 August 2004, a single mushroom pushed up through the grass near a shed of powdered buffalo manure the park gardeners used as fertiliser, pointed out to him by a colleague, Dr Prakitsin Sihanonth.
Some accounts instead place the original Thai collection back in the 1990s, during Allen's wider Southeast Asian travels, so even the date is not agreed.
Allen is said to have tracked the single specimen across roughly eight flushes over about seventy days, which is where its reputation as a tenacious, persistent line comes from.
It carries the usual collector's tale of being slower to get going but stubbornly hardy. Treat that as community reputation about the wild line, not a documented measurement.
As one veteran forum moderator dryly put it about strains like this, a lot of varieties are just names on a label. Worth keeping in mind for any name this quiet.

The story

A real name, a buffalo-manure shed, and a strain almost nobody remembers

Most cube backstories are a fog of anonymous handles and lost forum posts. Take Mountain is unusual because it points at a person you can actually look up. The name you will see most often is Tak Mountain, and by most accounts it traces to John W. Allen, the American ethnomycologist known as Mushroom John, who spent decades walking Southeast Asia and is credited with putting a long list of wild Thai cubensis lines into circulation. This is said to be one of them.

The telling that gets repeated goes like this. In Tak Province in northern Thailand, near Taksin Maharat National Park, Allen was reportedly beckoned over by a colleague, Dr Prakitsin Sihanonth, to look at a single mushroom that had pushed up through the grass beside a shed of powdered buffalo manure the park gardeners used as fertiliser. That lone fruitbody is said to have become the founding specimen, which he then grew on and documented across roughly eight flushes. The longer catalogue label TMNF, apparently for Taksinmaharat National Forest, comes from the same place. There is even a thread of Thai history tucked inside the name, since the famous King Taksin the Great took his own name from the town of Tak, where he served as vice-governor, rather than the other way round.

It is one of the rare cube names where the romantic origin story is actually attached to a documented collector, even if the details wobble from one telling to the next.

Documented, but barely circulated

Accuracy matters more than hype here. Even with a named collector behind it, Take Mountain is genuinely obscure. On the big mycology forums you will find people asking whether anyone still keeps it, and longtime regulars replying that they have never heard of it at all. Some sources also disagree on whether the founding find was in 2004 or back in the 1990s. None of that is a problem for a collector. It just means you are looking at a quiet, well-pedigreed Thai line rather than a household name, and that the backstory deserves the usual hedging: reportedly, is said to, by most accounts.

The species

Meet Psilocybe cubensis

Take Mountain is a collector’s line of a single, well-travelled species. Psilocybe cubensis was first written up in 1906 by the American mycologist Franklin Sumner Earle, from a specimen found in a cattle field in Cuba, which is where the name comes from. He originally called it Stropharia cubensis; Rolf Singer moved it into the genus Psilocybe in 1948.

The genus name is a tidy bit of Greek: psilos (“bare”) plus kubē (“head”), for the smooth, peelable skin of the cap, so the full name reads roughly as “the bare-headed mushroom from Cuba.”

Family: Hymenogastraceae (older books say Strophariaceae)
Genus: Psilocybe (Fr.) P. Kumm., 1871
Species: Psilocybe cubensis (Earle) Singer, 1948
Basionym: Stropharia cubensis Earle, 1906
This product: Take Mountain, a collector’s cultivar of the species
Type locality: Cuba (where it was first named)

How you’d know it

Field marks

These describe the mature mushroom for reference and identification.

Wide, pale, saucer-flat cap

Often described as caramel-to-rust-brown when young, sometimes with fine pale speckling, then opening broad and flat into a pale saucer shape as it matures. A standard pigmented cubensis cap, no albino or leucistic washout.

Thick white stipe

The stem is reported as thick and white, the chunky build you expect from a Thai line. A leftover partial veil leaves the usual ring, or annulus, on the stipe, which often ends up dusted purple-brown as spores drop onto it.

Darkening gills

Pale and crowded when young, the gills deepen toward purple-brown to near-black as the basidia mature and the spores ripen underneath the cap. This is what loads the print with colour.

Blue bruising

Handle or nick the flesh, especially at the base of the stipe, and it bruises blue-green. That is enzymes turning psilocybin to psilocin, which then oxidises into blue pigments. A classic Psilocybe tell, and one Allen reportedly noted on the later flushes.

Where it comes from

A dung-lover with a wanderer’s history

Psilocybe cubensis is coprophilic, a fancy word for dung-loving. In the wild it lives on the droppings of big grazing animals, classically cattle and water buffalo, fruiting from warm, humid pasture. It does not grow on wood and it does not partner with tree roots.

You’ll find it across the warm parts of the world: the Gulf Coast of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Australia. It was named from Cuba, but where the lineage truly began is an open question. A 2026 study describing its closest wild relative in southern Africa suggests the deep roots are Old-World, the mushroom having apparently travelled with grazing herds long before anyone gave it a Latin name.

The main event

Under the microscope

This is what you actually bought the spores for. Put a print or a drop from a syringe on a slide and here’s what shows up.

Shape & size. Smooth, thick-walled and subellipsoid, like a slightly squashed rugby ball, roughly 11.5–17 µm long by 8–11 µm wide (the figures Paul Stamets settled on).
The germ pore. Look for a single pale, flattened dot at one end. That’s the one thin spot in the wall where, in nature, a mushroom would begin, and a real cubensis hallmark.
Pale alone, dark in a crowd. A single spore looks honey-amber with the light behind it; only in a mass do they read deep purple-brown to black. So a near-black print but pale spores on the slide is normal optics, not a dud.
What you’ll need. Find the field at 100×, study shape and the germ pore at 400×, and get the wall crisp at 1000× under oil. A touch of methylene blue or KOH lifts the contrast.
The legal bit, and why it’s true. A dormant spore carries no psilocybin or psilocin at all; that chemistry only appears later in living tissue. That is exactly why the spores are legal to own and study in the UK.

Choose your format

Print, syringe, vial or swab?

Same lab-grade genetics in every option. The honest difference is shelf life versus how soon you’re at the scope.

Spore print

Keeps longest

Spores dropped straight onto sterile foil. Stored cool and dry it outlasts everything else here, so it’s the one to reach for if you’re building a collection to keep for years.

Spore syringe

Ready tonight

Spores suspended in sterile water, ready to go straight onto a slide. The quickest way to be looking down the microscope this evening. Comes in 3 mL and 12 mL.

Vial & swab

Compact

A sealed glass vial is a tidy middle ground; a sterile swab is the most travel-friendly, robust little format for adding a strain to your reference set.

At a glance

The spec sheet

Species: Psilocybe cubensis
Strain: Take Mountain (collector’s cultivar)
Spore print: Dark purple-brown to near-black, heavy depositor
Spore shape: Subellipsoid, smooth, thick-walled, with a germ pore
Spore size: ~11.5–17 × 8–11 µm
Basidia: Mostly 4-spored, ~20–30 × 7–10 µm
Wild habitat: Coprophilic, on herbivore dung & warm pasture
Climate: Subtropical to tropical
Intended use: Microscopy, research & collecting only

Dig deeper

Frequently asked

Yes, for microscopy and study. A dormant spore carries no psilocybin or psilocin, so the spores themselves are not a controlled substance in the UK. We sell them strictly for microscopy, taxonomy and collecting, never for cultivation.

Both names float around for the same Thai line, but Tak Mountain is the more common spelling and the more accurate one. It points at Tak Province in northern Thailand, where the founding mushroom was reportedly collected. Take is essentially a respelling that stuck on some labels.

That is the story most sources tell, and Allen is well documented as the collector behind many wild Thai cubensis lines. We would still call it strongly attributed rather than ironclad: the dates wobble between 2004 and the 1990s depending on who is telling it, so we hedge the history rather than state it flat.

Standard cubensis spores. Smooth, thick-walled and roughly oval, pale amber when viewed singly and dark purple-brown in a mass, each with a small flattened germ pore at one end. Find them at 100x, study them at 400x, and get the wall crisp at 1000x under oil immersion.

Neither headline holds up. It is a fully pigmented, normal-coloured cubensis, not an albino or leucistic line, and its reported strength sits around average for the species. As the hobby says, a cube is a cube. The interesting part of Take Mountain is its provenance, not any potency ranking.

Cool, dark and dry. A fridge, not a freezer, suits syringes and vials, while a print keeps happily in a sealed bag somewhere cool. Stored well, a print stays useful for study for years.

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For microscopy, taxonomy and collecting only.Sold for legal research. Not for cultivation. Spores contain no controlled substances. We trust you to be responsible.