Leaderboard

There are many mushrooms whose edibility has not been established. The pictured mushrooms bear no resemblance to oysters. If they are indeed honey mushrooms, you got lucky. There are plenty of poisonous mushrooms in Indiana, and some of them are deadly. Please educate yourself and be 100% sure of what you have before eating. No mushroom is so tasty that it's worth risking your life for.

Honey mushrooms. Should have a white sporeprint.

Look like honey mushrooms-should have a white spore print.

First off, I am jealous of your rain. It's been a long time since we've had any measurable precipitation. More often than not, chanterelle stems are riddled with insect tunnels -- if they have insecticidal properties, that's news to me. Golden Chanterelles do not grow on wood, they grow in soil. Smooth Chanterelles can sometimes cluster like that, but Golden Chanterelles rarely do. Finally, those gills look pretty thin and bladelike to me. Put that all together and I suspect you have Jack-O-Lanterns. There are three kinds of mycophagists: 1) Those with a healthy (irrational?) fear of all mushrooms that they didn't find in the neighborhood grocery store. 2) Those that study not only edibles, but also poisonous look-alikes and many other mushrooms they would not consider eating, because fungi are intrinsically interesting and cool to study (not to mention good photographic subjects). 3) Those who develop a passing familiarity with a few edible species and tend to disregard slightly different traits in the fervent hope that they still have something tasty in their possession. Guess which of the three is most likely to get poisoned? I can't ID the other two without photos of the undersides, but I will say that the third looks like a Russula of some kind. Hope this helps, and be careful out there.