The short answer
On a cubensis listing, "leucistic" means the mushroom is pale but its spores keep their normal pigment, so the print is purple-brown and a syringe looks like any other. "True albino" means the spores have no pigment either: the print is white to near colourless, the spores are translucent under the microscope, and a syringe can look like plain water. "Albino" on its own is used loosely and can mean either, so the print colour in the description is the thing to check.
The clearest example on Culture Cave is Albino A+, where all three vendors that list it say, in effect, that the name is wrong. Sonoran Spores calls the name "misleading because this is not a true albino variety, but a leucistic one", and Sporeworks lists it as "Albino (Leucistic) A+".
Where the words come from
Both terms are borrowed from animal biology. An albino animal makes no melanin at all; a leucistic one has reduced pigment in its skin, fur or feathers but usually keeps normally coloured eyes. Mycology has no formal equivalent, and on spore listings these are hobby labels rather than published genetic categories. Vendors apply them by what they see: the colour of the fruit body and, above all, the colour of the print.
Sonoran Spores gives the working definition in a sentence: albinos lack all pigmentation, while leucistic varieties keep the dark pigment in their spores. Sporeworks draws the same line on its A+ listing: "Unlike the PF albino, this mutated strain retains normally pigmented spores. Since there is also a small amount of pigment in the carpophores, this strain is better considered a leucistic form instead of a true albino." A carpophore is the fruit body. The word "true" in names such as True Albino Teacher exists precisely because plain "albino" had already been stretched to cover leucistic lines.
Why a leucistic line still drops a coloured print
The pigment in the cap and stem and the pigment in the spore wall are not the same thing. In ordinary cubensis the mature spores are dark purple-brown, and they are what colour the gills, the ring and the print. A leucistic line loses much of the colour from its tissue but keeps it in the spores, so the fruit body is white to cream while the gills still darken as the spores mature.
You can see it in the vendor descriptions. Sporeworks describes the A+ cap as "very pale cream" to white, with a ring that is soon purple with spores. Telly Monster Myco describes Leucistic Machine Elf as having "soft white fruiting bodies contrasted by deep purple gills". Pale cap, dark gills: that is leucism in a phrase.
Under the microscope, spores from a leucistic print look like any cubensis spores: dark, smooth, subellipsoid and thick-walled, with a germ pore. That makes a leucistic print an easy subject for a beginner, because it behaves exactly like a normal one.
Why a true albino syringe looks empty
In a true albino the spores themselves are unpigmented. Sporeworks lists the spores of True Albino Teacher as "few, transparent" and "white in deposit", and gives the same description for its Jack Frost isolate. Suspended in sterile water, translucent spores are invisible to the eye, so an albino syringe can look like water even when it is full. A print on foil or paper may be no more than a faint white haze that shows only under angled light.
The spores are still there at the microscope, but they are harder to see. Colourless spores give little contrast in bright-field light, so closing the condenser diaphragm, turning the light down or using a stain makes them easier to pick out. Shape and size are ordinary cubensis; only the colour is missing. The spore syringe microscopy guide covers slide preparation.
Two other things catch buyers out. First, white tissue shows blue bruising far more clearly than brown tissue does, so albino lines are often described in shades of blue; Summer Breeze Mycology, for one, describes True Albino Teacher by its blushing blue gills. Second, a swab can look stained even when the spores are clear. Sporeworks notes that although its Albino Penis Envy spores lack pigment, the tip of each swab is visibly discoloured, which it puts down to the indigo-blue pigments in the cap rather than the spores.
The albino lines on Culture Cave
These are the lines whose vendors describe them as albino, in several cases as true albino. The pedigrees are the vendors' own accounts, not published ones.
Albino Penis Envy is the most widely listed, from Purple Mountain Inoculation, Sonoran Spores, Fungus Frequency and Sporeworks. Sporeworks gives its origin as a hybrid of Penis Envy and PF Albino, and APE is hard to see twice over, since Penis Envy prints are sparse to begin with, as the Penis Envy vs Golden Teacher post explains. PF Albino is the other parent. Dino Spores calls it "the first albino readily available in our hobby", originally isolated by Psilocybe Fanaticus, and lists it as a swab set.
True Albino Teacher is the albino out of Golden Teacher; Sporeworks credits it to "a Golden Teacher multispore experiment by mycologist Jik Fibs". It is a parent of Jack Frost and of True Albino Melmak, which Fungus Frequency says "comes from the original cross of TAT and Melmak". What The Fungi lists its own TAM isolate, and the Melmak side of the family is covered in the Mak and Melmak post.
Avery's Albino is listed by Dino Spores as "a true albino strain isolated from the Cambodian lineage by Albinous White", and Fungus Frequency lists a squat isolation of it with "a pale white cap that turns blue once matured".
Several albinos are isolations from well-known pigmented lines. Fungus Frequency lists Albino Hillbilly and Albino Huautla, which it describes as "an albino isolation from the Huautla land race" and which Dino Spores and Black Forest Cultures also list. Albino Chodewave, from Fungus Frequency and TecheGenetics, is an albino isolation of Chodewave, itself a Tidalwave x APE cross. Albino Bluey Vuitton comes from Fungus Frequency, Mr Rogers Labz and Summer Breeze Mycology, and from TecheGenetics as A. Bluey Vuitton. Most of these listings do not state the print colour, so ask the vendor if it matters to your study.
The leucistic lines on Culture Cave
Albino A+ is the reference leucistic line, listed by Fungus Frequency, Sonoran Spores and Sporeworks. Fungus Frequency says plainly that it "isn't actually albino" but a leucistic variety that still has pigmented spores.
Leucistic Swamp Ghost is the most widely listed of the named leucistic crosses, from Dino Spores, Kaiju Cultures and What The Fungi. Dino Spores credits it to Julian Mattucci, as a cross of Long Ghost with a wild Florida cubensis made by pairing monokaryons, and tellingly sells it as a spore print: a leucistic line still has a print worth selling. Leucistic Hell Hound is listed by Summer Breeze Mycology and What The Fungi, and Leucistic Machine Elf by Telly Monster Myco, which describes it as a leucistic isolation from a Wild Peruvian x Penis Envy Uncut cross.
Leucistic Golden Teacher (LGT) follows the same pattern: Golden Teacher shape, pale caps, coloured print. Set beside True Albino Teacher, it is the neatest way to see the two terms applied to one parent line.
How to read the label
When a name says albino, a few checks settle what you are getting:
- Look for the spore or print colour in the description. "Pigmented spores" or a purple ring means leucistic; "translucent", "transparent" or "white in deposit" means true albino.
- Expect a true albino syringe or print to look nearly empty, and judge it at the microscope rather than by eye.
- Read "albino" in a cross name as a description of the fruit body, not a promise about the spores, unless the vendor says so.
The post on how to read a strain name covers the other tags you will meet, and the guide to spore prints and swabs explains why a faint print is not necessarily an empty one.
Psilocybe and Panaeolus spores on Culture Cave are sold for microscopy and taxonomy use only, and buyers must know their local law before ordering; see whether mushroom spores are legal in the UK or in the USA.