SUMPUR KUDUS, Indonesia — On a November night in 2025, Septian “Deki” Andriki collapsed to his knees in a muddy Sumatran forest and wept. After 13 years of searching, the former elementary school physical education teacher had finally found what he was looking for: a living specimen of Rafflesia hasseltii, a parasitic flower that had not been confirmed in the wild for more than a decade.
Andriki, now a self-taught rafflesia hunter, had been chasing rumors and dead ends across the Indonesian archipelago since 2012. The breakthrough came from a tip by a local resident, leading Andriki, Oxford Botanic Garden botanist Chris Thorogood, and Indonesian researcher Joko Ridho Witono on a nearly daylong trek through tiger-inhabited rainforest in West Sumatra’s Sijunjung Regency. When the team reached the location and spotted the flower’s blood-red, white-speckled petals unfurling, Andriki could not speak. “After 13 years, a 23-hour journey, risking tiger attacks, nearly dead phone batteries, I couldn’t talk,” he later said. “I just cried.” The emotional moment was captured on video and went viral across Indonesian, British and American media outlets.
A Rare Botanical Prize
Rafflesia hasseltii belongs to a genus of roughly 42 recognized species, all parasitic plants that lack leaves, stems or roots. They live hidden inside host vines for years, emerging only briefly to produce enormous flowers that emit a rotting-meat odor to attract carrion flies for pollination. This combination of rarity and biological strangeness makes rafflesias a holy grail for field botanists but also leaves them extremely vulnerable.
Researchers estimate that about two-thirds of known hasseltii populations exist outside legally protected forests, exposed to logging and land conversion. The 2025 rediscovery was part of a multinational research effort backed by the University of Oxford, involving scientists from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The team has been collecting DNA from more than a dozen rafflesia variants across Indonesia to understand the plant’s genetics and why it blooms so rarely.
The Quiet Work of Discovery
Beyond the viral moment, botanists worldwide are racing to identify and name new plant species before they vanish. The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis describes roughly 200 new species annually — about one in every 10 named globally. In 2025, the Garden highlighted discoveries including a Costa Rican cactus that took two decades to confirm, an endangered sapodilla relative from Madagascar known from only two sites, and a new persimmon species named for a deceased botanist.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History reported nine new species, three new genera and one new subgenus in 2025. A particularly significant finding involved a new subgenus of Vitis, the grapevine genus, based on two threatened wild grape species from Chiapas, Mexico, distinguished by red flowers and porous stems. It marks only the third recognized grape subgenus in nearly a century.
Discovery by Drone and by Chance
Some finds required no expedition. In Texas’ Big Bend National Park, volunteer botanist Deb Manley photographed unfamiliar fuzzy plants with maroon flowers and uploaded them to the citizen-science platform iNaturalist, leading to the identification of an entirely new genus nicknamed “wooly devil” — the first new plant genus documented in a U.S. national park since 1976.
In Hawaii, researchers used a drone with a robotic collecting arm to reach an inaccessible cliff face on Kauai, returning samples of a previously unknown species in the carnation family, Schiedea waiahuluensis. Scientists believe it may be the first new plant species ever discovered by drone.
A Race Against Time
These discoveries tell two stories: one of persistence and luck, the other of urgency. Many newly named plants are already among the rarest on Earth, restricted to single sites and threatened by habitat loss. Naming a species is the necessary first step before any legal protection or conservation funding can exist. As scientists note, a plant without a name has no defense.
With thousands of plant species still undescribed — many declining toward what researchers call “dark extinction” — the work continues. Each new discovery, whether through tears in a Sumatran forest or a robot arm on a Hawaiian cliff, is a small victory in a global race against time.