Whitebilly: a pale A.C.S line, and how to test what pale means

01What Whitebilly is

Whitebilly is an isolated Psilocybe cubensis line in the A.C.S collection the library carries through Mushrealm. The catalogue records the isolation and does not publish a parent cross for it.

02Lineage and history

The naming convention is worth explaining because it recurs across the whole catalogue. Breeders prefix a name with White, or insert Albino, Leucistic or Ghost, when the selection they kept was a pale one. Those words are used loosely across the hobby and mean three quite different things:

• Albino in common usage means the fruiting body lacks pigment. It is applied loosely, and some lines called albino still drop pigmented spores.
• Leucistic means reduced pigment rather than none, usually with normally coloured spores.
• True albino means no pigment anywhere, spores included.

Our full explanation is in albino, leucistic and true albino. The important point for this card is that the name signals a pale selection, and the library does not claim more than the catalogue records.

03Under the microscope

Here is the test, and it needs no microscope at all. Take a print. A pale grey or off-white deposit means the spores themselves are unpigmented, which is what "true albino" should mean. A normal purple-brown deposit from a pale mushroom means leucism, whatever the name on the card says.

Then put it on a slide. If the spores are unpigmented you will need the lamp low and the condenser diaphragm partly closed to resolve the walls; if they are pigmented the drop behaves like any other cubensis. Either result is a real observation worth writing in the notebook against the LOT.

04Where to buy Whitebilly in the UK

Whitebilly is in stock now. The card is Whitebilly spore syringe in the strain library. Every syringe is a 10 ml luer-lock, filled in a flow hood from a logged print into sterile water, capped, labelled with the strain and its LOT, and refrigerated until it is packed.

• Price: isolated lines are listed at £20 per syringe. The card shows the current price, including any sale.
• UK shipping: £3.80, and free on orders over £75. US orders ship at a flat $8.
• Dispatch: one to two working days from the UK, tracked, in a plain padded mailer with no branding on the outside.
• Every order is 18+ and confirms lawful microscopy use at checkout.

Browse the rest of the collection on the Mushrealm and A.C.S chapter, or open the strain library to filter by species, format or isolation status. If anything arrives cloudy or damaged, email a photo and the LOT number and it is replaced.