A Black Flower That Lives Underground and Eats Fungi Has Been Found on a Thai Hillside, and There Are Fewer Than Fifty
Thismia daemona has no leaves, no chlorophyll and no need for sunlight. It surfaces only to flower, black with horn-like appendages and two orange patches that look like eyes, in an area smaller than a football pitch.
Sunday, September 6, 2026/3 min read
Most plants are, at bottom, machines for turning sunlight into sugar. Thismia daemona has given that up entirely.
Described this week in the journal PhytoKeys by botanists from Chulalongkorn University and Prince of Songkla University, the newly named species has no leaves and no chlorophyll. It spends almost its whole life beneath the leaf litter of Thong Pha Phum National Park in western Thailand, and it feeds by stealing from fungi.
It comes to the surface only to flower, and the flower is what earned it the name. Black, with horn-like appendages crowning a domed cap, and two vivid reddish-orange patches at the base that the describing team compared to a demon's glowing eyes.
How a plant lives without light
The word is mycoheterotrophy and the arrangement is a kind of theft.
Beneath almost every forest floor is a network of fungi connected to the roots of trees. The trees pass sugar made in their leaves down to the fungi; the fungi pass water and minerals up to the trees. It is a trade, and it is one of the oldest partnerships on land.
A mycoheterotroph plugs into that network and takes without giving. It draws carbon from the fungi, which drew it from the trees, and it contributes nothing in return. Having no need to photosynthesise, it has no need for leaves, for green pigment, or for being above ground at all, and over evolutionary time it has lost all three.
That is why these plants are so rarely found. They are invisible for all but a few weeks a year, they are small, and they live where nobody is looking.
Where it was found, and why that is odd
Thong Pha Phum National Park, in Kanchanaburi province near the Myanmar border, at nearly a thousand metres in seasonal montane evergreen forest.
That is high and, for part of the year, dry, and both are unusual for the genus. Thismia species are mostly plants of low, wet, permanently humid forest. Finding one on a seasonal hillside expands what is known about where the group can live, and suggests that similar habitats elsewhere in the region may not have been searched properly.
The discovery brings the number of Thismia species recorded in Thailand to sixteen.
Fewer than fifty
This is the part that turns a curiosity into a conservation problem.
The entire known population of Thismia daemona is fewer than fifty individuals, in an area smaller than a football pitch. The authors have provisionally assessed it as Critically Endangered, and one of the threats they name is tourist activity inside the national park itself.
A plant that lives underground, in one small patch, on a trail people walk, can be trampled out of existence without anyone knowing it was there. Publication is therefore double-edged: it is the only way to secure protection, and it is also a map.
What is actually new here
Not the phenomenon. Mycoheterotrophy is well documented and Thismia is a known genus of such plants, with species across the tropics including one, famously, described once from a Chicago prairie in 1912 and never seen again.
What is new is a species, a habitat at the edge of the genus's known range, and a population small enough that the act of describing it carries an obligation. The team's own words on the name: combined with its hidden, subterranean and mysterious lifestyle on the forest floor, naming it Thismia daemona perfectly captured its enigmatic and devil-like essence.
The other story this week about a biological system doing something the textbooks said it should not is our piece on the eight-letter genetic alphabet. The formal description is summarised by the publisher, and the wider family of plants that abandoned sunlight is described under myco-heterotrophy.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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