Imleria badia such as food expert Antonio Carluccio, and is sold in markets in Europe and central Mexico. Its mushrooms are less often infested by maggots than other boletes. Several European studies have demonstrated that the mushroom can bioaccumulate some trace metals from the soil, such as mercury, cobalt, and nickel. Additionally, the mushroom contains a pigment that concentrates radioactive caesium; specimens collected in Europe following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster contained several times more caesium-137 than those collected before the incident. The bay bolete was first named as "Boletus castaneus" ß "badius" (i.e. a subspecies of "Boletus castaneus") by Elias Magnus Fries
Radiation effects from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster used to produce bio-diesel, which could be used to produce electricity. According to director William Nolten the region had a big potential for the production of clean energy. Some 800,000 hectares in the region could not be used to produce food anymore, and after the disaster because of fears for contamination the Japanese people refused to buy food produced in the region anyway. Experiments would be done to find out whether camelia was capable of extracting caesium from the soil. An experiment with sunflowers had no success. High levels of radioactive caesium were found in 23 varieties of freshwater fish