An "extremely rare" species of plants that look like glass is discovered in Japan

Fairy lanterns, or Thismiaceae as they are known in botany, are a type of plants that do not have green leaves or carry out photosynthesis.. They are tiny oddities of nature that feed on fungi and look like glass lanterns, hence their fairy-tale name.

There are a hundred known species but no new ones had been discovered for almost a hundred years, until now. The extremely rare find occurred in Japan, a country famous for its interest in flora and which has many amateur botanists who collaborate with scientists.

Fairy lanterns, or Tanuki-no-Shokudai or “raccoon dog candlestick”, as they are called in Japan, are found mainly in tropical, but also subtropical and temperate regions and only produce flowers for a short period. Additionally, they are very rare and difficult to find.

Thanks to local botanists

Kobe Suetsugu, a botanist at Kenji University and a recognized world expert in this type of plants, has long collaborated with local botanists who access remote areas throughout Japan and whose dedication “has been crucial to identifying species unknown to science,” the researcher acknowledges. So when he was sent a specimen of a fairy lantern that a hobbyist had found and that an expert believed represented a new species of the Tanuki-no-sokudai genus, he knew he had to investigate them.

Suetsugu realized that the plant was not part of any of the existing genera of Thismia and that it had “unique characteristics”, so he moved to Kimotsuki, in Kagoshima prefecture, where the discovery took place to search for new copies but his search gave no results. A year later, he tried again and this time he found four more plants, all of them in the same area.. The details of the new genus are published this Thursday in the Journal of Plant Research.

A new genre

From morphological and genetic analyses, the team concluded that the plant is not only a new species, but is in fact different enough from Tanuki-no-shokudai to be a distinct genus, the next level of kinship above species.

The researchers believe that the plant probably diverged early in the evolution of the entire Thismiaceae family and retains characteristics common to the family that have been lost in the Thismia genus. This is why Suetsugu chose the name Mujina-no-shokudai, or badger candlestick: Mujina is an old Japanese word for badger, but it has also sometimes been used for the raccoon dog, which is it seems, but from which it is different,” he explains.

“Japan is one of the regions in the world where botanical studies are most advanced, which makes the discovery of new plant species extremely rare, and the discovery of a new genus even more so,” he emphasizes. In fact, the last discovery of a new vascular plant simultaneously identified as a separate genus was that of Japonolirion in 1930.