APE Revert.

What's known

Here's what's meant to be true and not.

What we actually know

• It is a pick out of the Albino Penis Envy (APE) strain, which itself is reported to be a Penis Envy crossed with Albino A+, so it sits firmly inside the Penis Envy family of Psilocybe cubensis.
• It is still a plain Psilocybe cubensis. The Penis Envy lineage is selected cubensis, not a separate species or a cross with anything outside the species.
• Its defining trait is its spores: where true APE barely sporulates and drops near-clear spores, APE-R deposits a readable dark brown to purple print with only a small fraction of pale spores in the mass.
• The name 'Revert' refers to the strain shifting back toward an older, more typical cubensis look, most obviously in spore colour and in caps that open more than a classic Penis Envy.
• It shows less of APE's full albinism, so fruitbodies tend to come up creamy tan to caramel rather than the chalk-white of true APE.

What the community says

• The isolation is credited to a hobbyist named Jake Oncid around 2019, but this is community attribution passed between vendors rather than anything formally documented. Treat it as hearsay.
• The parent APE is a cross of Penis Envy and Albino A+, a story that is widely repeated in the hobby but rarely shown with any hard records.
• The Penis Envy backstory at the root of the family is the famous one: spores said to trace to a Terence McKenna collection in the Amazon, later worked on by Dr Steven Pollock before his 1981 murder. A 2021 Hamilton Morris interview with Richard Gee complicated the chain of custody. It is a great tale and a contested one.
• Some growers framed the 'reverted' look as a disappointment, a regression away from the prized PE blob, which is apparently where the slightly grumpy name comes from.

Where it came from

Most of the famous albino-lineage cubes share one frustration for anyone at a microscope: they barely drop a print. True Albino Penis Envy is the poster child for it, a thick, pale, stubborn thing that produces almost no spores, and what little it sheds comes out near colourless. APE Revert is the strain that, by most accounts, walked that back.

The story goes that APE-R is an isolation pulled out of APE around 2019, usually credited to a hobbyist named Jake Oncid. We would flag that the attribution is hearsay rather than fact, the way almost all of these modern vendor names are. What is consistent across the descriptions is the behaviour: this strain "reverted" toward an older, more typical cubensis look. The phallic Penis Envy cap relaxes and opens a bit more, the chalk-white fades toward creamy tan and caramel, and crucially the spores come back, normally coloured and plentiful enough to read.

A "revert" just means a selected strain drifting back toward its ancestral look. In APE-R the giveaway is the spore print: dark and readable where its albino parent gives you almost nothing.

What to expect at the scope

For a study sample that is the whole appeal. You get a fruitbody that still carries plenty of the bulky Penis Envy family character, but it actually deposits. The print is dark brown to purple with only a scattering of pale spores left over from the albino side, which makes it far less of a chore to work with than true APE. It is reportedly a touch prone to throwing odd or mutant forms, which is fairly typical of the heavily selected PE lineage. Take the precise origin with a pinch of salt and enjoy it for what it verifiably is: an albino-strain cube that gives you something proper to look at.