In the weird world of “fairy lanterns,” there’s a new species to admire. The mysterious parasitic herb looks like something from another planet.
It’s a member of the genus Thismia. These tend to have pint-size flowers that come in wacky shapes and bright colors. Those weird blooms evolved to lure in fungus gnats and other pollinators. Researchers have just identified a never-before-seen species. It sprouts just above dense leaf litter in the rainforests of Malaysia.
The team shared its findings May 31 in PhytoKeys.
Finding the newest fairy lantern
By plant standards, Thismia are truly odd. Found in tropical forests, fairy lanterns spend most of their lives underground. So they don’t get much sunlight. That would be a problem for other plants that get their energy from the sun through photosynthesis. But fairy lanterns don’t do photosynthesis. Instead, they soak up nutrients from fungi in the soil.
Thismia do briefly erupt from the soil to flower. But being only a few centimeters tall, they can be easy to miss.
“The search for Thismia is not easy,” says Mat Yunoh Siti-Munirah. She works for the Forest Research Institute Malaysia in Kepong. “If [we’re] at the right time and in the right place, we can find it. But sometimes the visit remains unsuccessful, even after a few attempts.”
Siti-Munirah is a botanist. She catalogs the biodiversity of these parasitic plants in Malaysia. This Southeast Asian country sits just north of the equator. In 2020, one of her colleagues found an unusual fairy lantern there in Tengku Hassanal Wildlife Reserve. Later, a colleague spotted more of these plants in a different Malaysian park. Siti-Munirah traveled to the rainforests in these parks to confirm those reports.
In the lab, she and her team compared the newfound species with known fairy lanterns. The new ones, they realized, did not belong to any known type. So the researchers classified them as a new species:…
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