Wildest Plant & Fungi Discoveries #World Research Awards

A zombie fungus that springs from a trapdoor and a flame-like shrub named after the fire demon in the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle are among the species of plant and fungi named by scientists in 2025.

A list of 10 “weird and wonderful” new species was compiled by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG), Kew and their international partners, who together named 125 new plants last year. The list also includes an orchid whose flowers look bloodstained and attract sexually aroused flies, and a beautiful snowdrop that had been hiding in plain sight in UK gardens.


Among further new species named is a fruit that grows on the forest floor of Papua New Guinea and tastes like banana mixed with guava , and an elegant new Christmas palm from the Philippines.

There are estimated to be as many as 100,000 plant species globally that are yet to be discovered by scientists and 2-3 million species of fungi. Researchers name about 2,500 new plants each year on average.

However, it is a race against time to find and describe new species before they are driven to extinction by humanity’s destruction of nature. As many as three-in-four undescribed plants are already threatened with extinction. The loss of habitats to farming, building and mining are key drivers along with pollution and the climate crisis.

“Wherever we look, human activities are eroding nature to the point of extinction, and we simply cannot keep up with the pace of destruction,” said Dr Martin Cheek, at RBG in Kew.

“Describing new plant and fungal species is essential at a time when the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change accelerate before our eyes: it is difficult to protect what we do not know, understand and have a scientific name for.

“If we fail to invest in taxonomy, conservation and public awareness of the issues now, we risk dismantling the very systems that sustain our life on Earth.”

Even for those plant species already named, about 40% are threatened with extinction.

The new zombie fungus is a spider-eating species from the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil. It infects trapdoor spiders, which hide in burrows under the forest floor to ambush prey. The fungus envelops the spider in white mycelium threads and then emerges from the corpse as a fruiting body that passes up through the trapdoor hole, where it can release its spores and repeat the cycle.


Unravelling how the strategy evolved required the scientists to use cutting-edge, portable genome technology, which allowed the fungus’s genetic blueprint to be decoded in the field.

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