Critically endangered leafless orchid found at a second site on NSW Mid North Coast

The Bonville leafless orchid, officially named Danhatchia copelandii, was discovered by Dr Copeland in 2018 on the property where he was living, and the species is named after him. It lives underground for most of the year and emerges only to flower, for one to two weeks annually.

Mr Lambert, who is friends with Dr Copeland, went with him on October 22 to see the orchids while they were flowering. "The next day I was feeling adventurous, and thought, 'I am going to check out some spots and see if I can spot some more,'" he said. "I went to a rainforest near Boambee in the foothills of the mountains and managed to find another population of them, around 50 or so, and that was pretty awesome actually."

The orchid has no leaves and therefore does not photosynthesise, drawing its nutrients solely from a fungus beneath the soil. "It's a tiny little thing, about 10 centimetres tall, reddish and hairy and has these tiny little flowers that open up," Mr Lambert said. "It's pretty special because you can't see it anywhere else in the world."

Dr Copeland said he had shown the original site to about 30 botanists over the years, who had all tried and failed to find the species elsewhere. "And then Nick rocks up and finds a much bigger and better population in all respects, so he showed us all up, much to his credit," he said.

He said he had seen only six or seven plants at the Bonville site in recent years and recorded 17 there this spring. Counting the new cluster, more than 60 plants are now known altogether, compared with about six when he counted last year. "I've surveyed it quite thoroughly every spring, with the most plants seen being 43 and the least about four. It's only visible for a few weeks each year," he said.

Dr Copeland said the new site would become part of the protected Great Koala National Park, which he described as great news for the species' survival. "So, by chance they are conserved, and by chance that area has escaped historical logging," he said.

Brett Summerell, chief scientist at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, said the finding was "very significant". "One of the issues we have to deal with, with threatened species, is often they have really small populations and really low genetic diversity," he said. "Finding another population of a significant number of individuals really provides the potential for the genetic diversity. Also, if something happens in one location, we now have another back-up location."

Professor Summerell said the orchids could not be grown outside the wild. "They are impossible to cultivate in propagation, we can't do that at the Botanic Gardens, so we are really dependent on making sure those populations in the ground are viable," he said. "By protecting them we are protecting the whole biodiversity in that space."

He said a specimen would be held at the National Herbarium of NSW at Mount Annan, in Sydney's south west, and that while there was no doubt about the identity of the plants given Dr Copeland's expertise, they would be officially identified through that process and incorporated into the collection.