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Psilocybe cubensis
Treasure Coast
A reputed Florida coast landrace with a pale golden look, a heavy purple-brown spore drop, and one famous quirk: it loves to throw the odd ghostly low-pigment fruitbody.
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Sold for microscopy, taxonomy and collecting only. Not for cultivation.
filled under laminar flow
plain packaging, tracked
The short version
Treasure Coast is a Psilocybe cubensis line reputedly foraged from the dung-rich pastures of Florida's Gulf and Treasure Coast. It is a plain, prolific cube with pale caramel caps and a generous, dependable purple-brown spore print. Its real claim to fame for collectors is a strong tendency to throw the occasional albino or leucistic fruitbody, the quirk that later spawned the LTC and ATC lines.
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
- Genetically it is a plain Psilocybe cubensis, a reputed geographic line rather than a hybrid or a separate species.
- Its name comes from a real place: Florida's Treasure Coast, the eastern stretch of shoreline roughly from Stuart to Sebastian, named for the 18th-century Spanish treasure fleets wrecked offshore.
- The standard line is a heavy, prolific sporulator that drops a dark purple-brown print, exactly what a collector wants from a cube.
- It is well known for occasionally throwing pale, low-pigment fruitbodies, the quirk that the leucistic (LTC) and albino (ATC) Treasure Coast lines were later isolated from.
- As with every cube, strength sits around average for the species. A cube is a cube.
What the community says
- The story goes that it was foraged from cow and horse pasture along the Gulf Coast of southern Florida, then passed into the spore-trading scene as a wild landrace. No collector or date is actually on record.
- It is often said to date to the early 1990s, but that timeline is community memory, not documentation.
- Some tellings credit the same shadowy 1990s figure, 'Mr. G', who is also wrapped up in the B+ origin myth. Treat any single-person origin claim as lore.
- Vendor copy sometimes calls it 'super potent' or uniquely strong. There is no good evidence it out-punches an ordinary cube.
The story
A landrace named after sunken treasure
The name is the most solid thing about this one, and it is genuinely good. The Treasure Coast is a real stretch of Florida's Atlantic shoreline, running roughly from Stuart up to Sebastian, christened for the Spanish treasure fleet that wrecked along it in a 1715 hurricane and scattered gold and silver into the surf. The mushroom is said to have been foraged inland from that coast, out of the cow and horse pasture of southern Florida, and to have carried the region's name into the early spore-trading scene as a wild line.
How much of that is documented? Not much. By most accounts it surfaced in the early 1990s, and some tellings hand the credit to the same half-mythical figure, "Mr. G", who turns up in the B+ story too. But there is no collector on record, no date you could cite, and no herbarium voucher. The people who pass it around will happily tell you the original stabiliser has been lost to time. So take the foraging tale as a likely-true but unproven origin rather than gospel.
The version is that Treasure Coast is a reputed Florida landrace with a great name and a thin paper trail. The mushroom is real and well-studied; the human backstory is mostly folklore.
The ghost in the flush
What actually sets Treasure Coast apart under a collector's eye is not its history but a habit: it is famous for occasionally throwing a pale, low-pigment fruitbody among the normal caramel ones. That tendency is genuinely characteristic of the line, and it is the trait two later projects pulled on deliberately. The leucistic version, Leucistic Treasure Coast or LTC, is widely said to have been isolated by a hobbyist going by Luna Morningstar; an albino selection (ATC) followed. Leucistic means reduced pigment, not none, so those pale forms can still carry some colour in the gills and spores, whereas a true albino loses pigment more completely. The standard Treasure Coast you are looking at here is the ordinary, fully-coloured parent line, the one that drops a proper dark print.
The species
Meet Psilocybe cubensis
Treasure Coast 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
- Treasure Coast, 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.
Pale caramel cap
Medium-sized, roughly 15 to 25 mm across at maturity, convex opening to plane and sometimes lightly umbonate. Light caramel to golden, often with a slightly darker centre, and noticeably paler overall than many cubes. Keep an eye out for the occasional near-white fruitbody, which is this line's signature quirk.
Slim white stem
Slender, fibrous and white to off-white, bruising blue-green where handled. A partial veil leaves an annulus (ring) on the stipe that usually ends up dusted purple-brown as spores rain onto it.
Darkening gills
Crowded and pale when young, ripening through grey to a deep purplish-brown as the spores mature. That darkening is the spores themselves loading up, which is why this line prints so readily.
Blue bruising
Bruise the flesh and it goes blue-green, the classic Psilocybe tell: enzymes turn psilocybin into psilocin, which oxidises into blue pigment. Present even on the pale fruitbodies.
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.
- Watch for the pale outliers. The standard line prints a normal heavy purple-brown, but Treasure Coast is unusually prone to throwing low-pigment fruitbodies, and a print or sample taken from one of those can come out faint or sparse rather than dark. If a deposit looks unexpectedly weak, you may simply be looking at spores from a leucistic individual rather than a poor sample.
- 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
- Treasure Coast (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
Further reading
Independent, non-commercial sources, no shops, just good information.
- Psilocybe cubensis on Wikipedia: the species overview.
- The genus Psilocybe: taxonomy and the family reshuffle.
- Index Fungorum: the formal nomenclature record.
- Proc. Royal Society B (2026): the African wild-relative study.
Common questions
Frequently asked
Yes, for microscopy and study. A dormant spore contains 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.
No. The standard line is fully pigmented, with caramel caps and a normal dark purple-brown print. It is simply prone to throwing the odd pale fruitbody, which is the raw trait the separate leucistic (LTC) and albino (ATC) Treasure Coast lines were later isolated from. If you want the consistently pale phenotype, that is a different line.
From the ordinary Treasure Coast, a heavy, dependable dark purple-brown deposit. It is a prolific sporulator, so prints tend to load up nicely. Only the rare low-pigment fruitbodies print pale or sparse.
Smooth, thick-walled, subellipsoid spores, pale amber alone and dark purple-brown in mass, each with a small germ pore at one end, sitting on four-spored basidia. Find them at 100x, study the shape at 400x, and get the wall sharp at 1000x under oil.
A print keeps for years dry on a shelf and is the better archive. A syringe puts you at the microscope sooner. The vial and swab sit between the two on convenience.
Cool, dark and dry. A fridge (not a freezer) suits syringes and vials; prints keep happily in a sealed bag somewhere cool. Stored well, a print stays viable for study for years.
What customers say
Reviews
Wonderful product
Definitely 5 star
Great syringe for my peculiar spore microscopy hobby. Over the microscope they seem to say hi to everyone but maybe I had tired eyes that night. Have a good day
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Questions and answers
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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.