The Magallanes morel that still has no name

On 19 January 2026, La Prensa Austral published an interview with Claudia Gómez, regional director of INIA Kampenaike, about morel specimens collected in Magallanes showing morphological variations relative to those from Aysén. Her words were: «We could be facing a species unique in the world, the Magallanes morel».

In the same interview she also said: «We sent them for analysis to determine what type of Morchella it is, but we have not yet been able to identify the species». It matters to read both sentences together. The first is conditional; the second explains why.

Seven months later

As of this page’s date there is no formal description of the species on record. There is no publication, no valid name and, as far as we have been able to check, no journalistic follow-up to that interview. The question left open is simple and nobody has asked it publicly: did the analysis results come back?

Why this is hard, and not negligence

Morchella species are cryptic: they look alike and are separated by genetic sequencing, not by appearance. Nobody can look at a specimen and say which species it is, however expert. Dr Ángela Machuca’s team at the University of Concepción took close to a decade to describe two Chilean species, Morchella andinensis and Morchella aysenina, announced in April 2025.

That difficulty has a direct commercial consequence: the fungus is exported mixed and generic because nobody knows what is being exported. Machuca has proposed precisely the opposite, differentiating it by species and origin to «add value and directly benefit the collecting communities».

What is at stake

According to the same January interview, a kilo fetches around 200,000 pesos in Chile and up to three times that in Europe. Harvesting is manual, wild and mostly done by women; cultivation is not stable. It is a high-value product whose name is given by the buyer.

Fire

The relationship between fires and morels is documented and remains unexplained. Dr Machuca described it thus: «the same year the fires occur there is abundant fruiting, but in the following seasons it drops sharply until it ceases». Dr Götz Palfner, of the same university, offers a hypothesis and expressly labels it speculation: the mechanism is not known.