Redboy.

What's known

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

What we actually know

• Redboy is a plain Psilocybe cubensis, not a hybrid or separate species. Its one genuine oddity is spore colour.
• The documented origin is a single fruitbody Stephen L. Peele is said to have collected from a pasture in Cantonment, Florida in 1982, after noticing the gills looked off-coloured.
• Its claim to fame is a red to burgundy spore print rather than the purple-black almost every other cubensis drops. By the accounts that survive, it was treated as a rare colour condition rather than a new species.
• Red-spored cubensis mutations have turned up elsewhere in the world, so Redboy is the documented and named example of a known phenomenon rather than a unique one.
• Because the surviving strain was reportedly outcrossed during its revival, much modern Redboy stock 'reverts' to a normal dark print, which is why collectors specifically hunt a genuinely red-dropping sample.

What the community says

• The story goes that Peele handed a print to the well-known Shroomery grower RogerRabbit around 2004 so the nearly-lost strain would have a better chance to live on.
• The colourful revival tale claims the original 20-year-old spores would not germinate, so monokaryotic Puerto Rican cubensis mycelium was allowed to crawl over them in a petri dish to coax them back. Treat this as hearsay.
• Part of that same story has rattlesnake venom added to the agar to weaken cell walls and let the genetics mix. It is a great yarn and should be read as folklore, not method.
• Redboy is widely said to bruise green rather than the classic Psilocybe blue, though how reliable that is across samples is genuinely unclear.
• The name is usually read straight off the reddish tones on the cap and the red spores, but no formal naming account is documented.

Where it came from

Nearly every Psilocybe cubensis on earth drops a spore print somewhere between deep purple and black. Redboy is the famous exception. By most accounts the strain traces back to a single mushroom that the Florida mycologist Stephen L. Peele is said to have pulled from a cattle pasture in Cantonment, Florida, in 1982. The story goes that he only noticed something was off when the gills looked the wrong colour, and that the real surprise came after he laid the day's collection out to take prints and found one of them had dropped red.

Cultures grown from that print reportedly kept the trait, generation after generation. A DEA investigation into the find is said to have concluded it was not a new species at all, just a rare colour condition in an ordinary cubensis. Peele apparently listed it through his Florida Mycology Research Center as the "red spore" cube, and red-spored mutants have since been reported from other corners of the world too, so Redboy is best thought of as the documented, named example of a known oddity rather than a one-off miracle.

Whatever else is myth here, the documented core is unusually solid for a cube: a person, a year, a place, and a spore print that came out the wrong colour.

What to expect at the scope

The strain nearly vanished. The widely repeated revival tale has Peele passing a print to the Shroomery grower RogerRabbit around 2004, with the original two-decade-old spores refusing to germinate until they were reportedly coaxed back by letting Puerto Rican cubensis mycelium crawl over them, allegedly with a dab of rattlesnake venom in the agar. Read that part as folklore. What matters for a collector is the consequence: because the survivor was apparently outcrossed, a lot of "Redboy" floating around today quietly reverts to a normal dark print. Finding a sample that genuinely lays down red is the whole point of chasing this one.