Deep in a mountain forest in western Thailand, a group of botanists brushed aside some leaf litter. What they found looked ripped straight out of a Victorian horror illustration. It was a tiny, almost-black flower with what look like two glowing orange eyes beneath a pointed hood. They named it, quite fittingly, Thismia daemona, the devil flower.
The discovery, described this month in the scientific journal PhytoKeys by researchers from Chulalongkorn University and Prince of Songkla University, was made in Thong Pha Phum National Park. It turned up in a seasonal evergreen forest at nearly 1,000 meters of elevation. And that’s already the first surprise: Thismia, the genus it belongs to, usually lives in humid lowland rainforests, not in relatively dry mountains. This particular plant, it seems, never bothered reading its own family’s instruction manual.
The devil flower can’t be bothered with photosynthesis
The strangest thing about the devil flower isn’t just its videogame-villain looks, but how it actually lives. It has no chlorophyll, so it can’t make its own food from sunlight the way the rest of the plant kingdom does. Instead, it’s mycoheterotrophic: it feeds off underground fungi, drawing nutrients through roots shaped like miniature coral. In fact, it’s an arrangement the fungi would probably call deeply unfair, if they were in any position to complain.
That means the plant spends almost its entire life underground, invisible, feeding in the dark. Only when it’s time to reproduce does its flower poke up through the leaf litter. It stays up for just a few days, long enough to get pollinated, before vanishing again. That’s exactly why plants like this are so hard to find: it’s not so much that they’re impossibly rare, it’s that they’re extremely good at hiding.
Demon eyes and a tiny haute-couture outfit
The technical description of the flower reads like a fashion catalog for ghosts. It has fleshy, reddish-orange outer petals and an inner hood shaped like a bishop’s mitre, topped with three slender, horn-like appendages. Its stamens, meanwhile, are translucent blue with recurved tips. The orange patches at the base look uncannily like a pair of glowing eyes. They’re exactly what earned it both its name and its sudden internet fame.
With this addition, Thailand now has 16 recorded Thismia species within its borders. However, there’s another detail that makes this one special: it belongs to a section of the genus called Geomitra, previously known only from Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, and Sumatra. As a result, its appearance in mainland Thailand pushes the known range of this entire plant group several hundred kilometers north for the first time.
Discovered — and already at risk of disappearing
The bad news arrives fast: researchers have only located a single population of fewer than 50 individuals. They’re packed into an area smaller than a football pitch. Because of that, it has already been provisionally assessed as critically endangered, before most of us have even learned to pronounce its name correctly.
It’s a pattern that keeps repeating with these underground plants. Because they depend on one specific fungus, one specific humidity level, and one very particular patch of forest, any disturbance — a road, logging, a shift in local climate — can wipe them off the map. That could happen before science even finishes figuring them out. In fact, Thismia daemona had probably been hiding there long before Thailand existed as a country. Now that we’ve finally spotted it, we’d better not become the reason we stop seeing it. Meanwhile, if this species caught your attention, here’s another recent find from the very same country worth reading about: this lizard named after Syrax is a real dragon.