- Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, formally named 125 plants and 65 fungi in 2025, including a zombie fungus that parasitizes Brazilian spiders, a bloodstained orchid from Ecuador, and a fire-colored shrub named after a Studio Ghibli character.
- Up to three out of four undescribed plant species are already threatened with extinction, with at least one species described this year possibly already extinct in its native Cameroon habitat.
- An estimated 100,000 plant species and between 2 million and 3 million fungal species remain to be described and formally named by science.
- Many newly described species face immediate threats from habitat loss, illegal collection and climate change, highlighting the urgent need to protect areas before species disappear.
Over the past year, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., officially named 125 plants and 65 fungi. The new-to-science species include a parasitic fungus that turns Brazilian spiders into “zombies,” a critically endangered orchid with blood-red markings from Ecuador’s cloud forests, and a shrub named after the fire demon from the 2004 Hayao Miyazaki film Howl’s Moving Castle.
Each year, Kew releases a list of its “top 10” new plant and fungal species to showcase nature’s vast diversity, as well as its fragility, as many newly described species are already in danger.
According to Kew’s “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2023” report, three out of four undescribed plants are threatened with extinction. One species described in 2025, Cryptacanthus ebo, a bromeliad from the Ebo Forest in Cameroon, may have already gone extinct.
Each year, researchers worldwide officially name about 2,500 new plants and even more fungi. An estimated 100,000 plant species and between 2 million and 3 million fungal species remain to be described and named by science. Many of these unnamed fungi are endophytes that live entirely within plant tissues, making up the plants’ microbiomes.
“Describing new plant and fungal species is essential at a time when the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change accelerate before our eyes,” Martin Cheek, a senior research leader in Kew’s Africa team, said in a press release. “It is difficult to protect what we do not know, understand and have a scientific name for.”
Although a species may be new to science, that doesn’t mean it has never been seen. In many instances, local and Indigenous guides already have a name for and a relationship with the plants.
Here is a look at Kew’s top 10 newly described species for 2025:
Zombie spider fungus (Brazil)
This spider-eating fungus, Purpureocillium atlanticum, from Brazil’s Atlantic Forest infects trapdoor spiders buried inside their burrows in the forest floor. The fungus covers the spider almost completely with soft, cotton-white mycelium. From the spider’s corpse, a fruiting body up to 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) long emerges, pushes through the trapdoor hole, and rises above the ground to release spores and continue the cycle.
Scientists used portable DNA-sequencing technology in the field to decode the fungus’s genetic blueprint and understand how this gruesome survival strategy evolved.
Bloodstained orchid (Ecuador)
Telipogon cruentilabrum is a new orchid species from the high Andean forests of Cotopaxi, Ecuador. Named for the bloodstained appearance of its lip, the species grows non-parasitically on tree daisies about 1.5 to 3 meters (5 to 10 feet) above the ground. Its showy yellow flowers with red veins measure 3.8 cm (1.5 in) across.
Like other Telipogon species, its flowers mimic female flies to attract males for pollination. The species can only be identified when in flower, making it notoriously difficult to study and cultivate.
More than half of this orchid’s habitat has already been cleared for mining and agriculture. Scientists have informally assessed it as endangered.
Fire demon flower
Scientists named Aphelandra calciferi after Calcifer, the fire demon from the 2004 Hayao Miyazaki animated film Howl’s Moving Castle, because of its flame-like bright orange-red and yellow flowers. This 3-meter-tall forest shrub is one of two new species from Peru described in 2025.
Scientists believe the striking plant has great potential as a conservatory ornamental that could be grown in gardens. The species description was published by a Peruvian-U.K. research team, with John Wood from Kew’s Americas team serving as the most prolific publisher of new species at Kew in 2025, describing 25 species in total.
Mopane lithops (Namibia)
Lithops gracilidelineata mopane is a new subspecies of lithops, or “living stones,” a group of plants famous for their stone-like camouflage. Though they appear to be nothing more than pebbles, lithops are actually succulents with a single pair of leaves that allow light through an upper “window” into internal photosynthetic surfaces. The plants produce a single, daisy-like flower.
This new mopane lithops differs from all other known lithops by living in a higher-rainfall area with mopane woodland rather than arid regions. It also has smooth, whitish-gray leaf surfaces instead of the sculptured cream or brownish-pink surfaces of similar subspecies.
Illegal overcollection from the wild to supply the cultivation market is driving several lithops species toward extinction.
Balkan snowdrop (Macedonia and Kosovo)
Although already being cultivated in U.K. gardens, this unusual snowdrop didn’t match any known species when first observed by snowdrop enthusiast Ian McEnery. Scientists led by Kew’s Aaron Davis investigated the mystery and traced its origin to the subalpine grasslands of Mount Korab in northern Macedonia and Kosovo.
Now officially named Galanthus subalpinus, its flowers closely resemble the common snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) while its leaves appear to fit a different species. DNA sequence analysis and genome size data confirmed its status as a new species.
The tiny snowdrop has already been assessed as critically endangered due to its small population size and threats from collecting for the horticultural trade, with overgrazing and fires adding further risks.
Ground-fruiting tree (Papua New Guinea)
Picking fruit from this 18-m (59-ft) tree from Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, is relatively easy because the fruit grows on unusual whip-like stems. These stems run down from the trunk and along the ground for up to 7 m (23 ft), producing small white flowers.
According to the collectors who discovered it, the fruit tastes like banana mixed with guava and even has an aftertaste of eucalyptus. The nearly spherical fruit measures 4-5 cm (1.6-2 in) in diameter, with distinct ridges running from top to bottom.
Named Eugenia venteri for Fanie Venter, one of the botanists who described it, the species is thought to have evolved this ground-fruiting strategy so its flowers can be pollinated and its seeds dispersed by the giant ground rats found in New Guinea.
Giant Cameroon tree (Cameroon)
By far the biggest and heaviest new species Kew scientists described this year, Plagiosiphon intermedium grows to a height of 34 m (112 ft) in Cameroon’s rainforest and has a trunk diameter of up to 66 cm (26 in). A rough calculation puts the mass of just one of these trees at 5 metric tons.
This detarioid legume, a member of the bean family, is the first species added to the Plagiosiphon genus in nearly 80 years. The genus previously contained just five species confined to the forests of Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of Congo, with one species extending to West Africa. These legume trees grow in groups and depend on symbiotic relationships with ectomycorrhizal fungi on their roots.
The new species is known from only two locations, both in Ngovayang, one of Cameroon’s top hotspots for unique plant species that is currently unprotected.
Grass root fungus (China)
A high proportion of fungi that scientists have yet to describe are those not easily detected by the human eye — those lacking large fruiting bodies like toadstools. Among these are fungal endophytes that spend their entire lives inside living plants, showing no signs of disease and most likely benefiting their hosts. All known land plants have fungal endophytes living in their tissues.
Magnaporthiopsis stipae is one such example, isolated from the roots of a grass species growing in Inner Mongolia, China. This species is just one of 24 new species, 11 new genera and one new family published in a study of fungi that are mainly endophytes and agents of plant diseases.
The discovery highlights the vast number of microscopic fungal species, possibly millions, that remain unknown to science.
Christmas palm (Philippines)
Known locally as amuring in the Waray-Bisaya language, this beautiful red-fruited palm grows to a height of 5-15 m (16-49 ft) and was first spotted by scientists in 2013. Now scientifically recognized as Adonidia zibabaoa, it grows on karst limestone ridges in a small area of typhoon-prone Samar Island, in the Visayas archipelago of the central Philippines. The species name derives from an old name for Samar.
Designating it as new to science proved challenging because scientists weren’t immediately sure what genus it belonged to. However, DNA analyses confirmed its placement in the genus Adonidia. Only two other species are known in this genus, including the Manila palm (Adonidia merrillii), one of the most widely cultivated tropical ornamental plants in the world.
Palm enthusiasts are already highly interested in cultivating this new species in gardens.
Caterpillar orchid (Indonesia)
Named Dendrobium eruciforme, the caterpillar orchid earned its common name because the tiny, creeping plants resemble a colony of caterpillars sitting on a tree trunk. This is the smallest of six new orchid species published by Indonesian scientists along with Kew’s Andre Schuiteman.
Five of the discoveries came from Kew’s work with local partners to identify the most important areas to conserve in Indonesia’s Papua region through the Tropical Important Plant Areas project, with 13 such areas published so far. Three of the species are from the Crown Jewel project area, which conserves some of the world’s most species-rich and intact tropical rainforest, home to birds-of-paradise made famous in the U.K. by David Attenborough.
Banner image of Telipogon cruentilabrum, a newly described orchid species found in the high Andean forests of Cotopaxi, Ecuador. Photo courtesy of L.Baquero.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message directly to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
