Botanists surveying a national park in western Thailand have described a new species of flowering plant so strange it does not photosynthesize, spends nearly its entire life hidden beneath leaf litter, and produces a black, horn-topped bloom with reddish-orange patches that resemble a pair of glowing eyes. They named it Thismia daemona — the "devil flower."
The plant was found by researchers from Chulalongkorn University and Prince of Songkla University during surveys of Thong Pha Phum National Park, growing at nearly 1,000 meters elevation — an unusually high and seasonally dry setting for its genus. Fewer than 50 individual plants have been located in a single small population, leading the team to provisionally classify the species as Critically Endangered. The discovery is described in the open-access journal PhytoKeys.
A plant that steals its food
Thismia species lack chlorophyll entirely. Instead of drawing energy from sunlight, they tap into underground fungal networks and siphon nutrients the fungi have already extracted from surrounding trees — a strategy botanists call mycoheterotrophy. Because the plants spend most of their lives as thread-like structures buried in soil, they surface only briefly to flower, making them notoriously difficult to find; new species are often located by chance during unrelated fieldwork.
T. daemona belongs to a subgroup of the genus, section Geomitra, previously known only from Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra. Its discovery in Thailand pushes the known range of that entire section farther north for the first time, according to researchers describing the find, and suggests related undiscovered species may be hiding in forest floors across the region.
The description brings the number of Thismia species recorded in Thailand to 16, part of a broader global pattern in which dozens of new species in the genus have been identified over the past two decades as botanists pay closer attention to leaf litter rather than canopy or understory vegetation.
A find and a warning
Researchers involved in the work say the plant's rarity and narrow habitat make it acutely vulnerable: a single population confined to one patch of forest can be wiped out by logging, land conversion or even foot traffic from curious visitors. Conservation botanists have increasingly pushed for new mycoheterotrophic species to be assessed for protection immediately upon description, rather than waiting years for follow-up surveys, given how easily such populations can vanish before they are documented.
No further expeditions to the site have been announced, but the research team said additional surveys of similar high-elevation, seasonally dry forest patches in the region are planned, in hopes of determining whether other undiscovered populations exist nearby.