An Instagram Selfie Led Botanists to the Victoria Colombiana Waterlily

A photograph posted to Instagram in 2021 has led to the formal description of the Victoria colombiana waterlily, a new giant species in Colombia. Jeremiah Harris, a carnivorous plant grower from the United States, photographed the plants while swimming in the Inirida region and posted the pictures online, identifying them at the time as Victoria amazonica. Carlos Magdalena, a botanical and scientific research horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, saw the photographs and noticed a problem with that identification. According to the team behind the discovery, the known natural range of Victoria waterlilies did not extend to the Inirida River in Guainia, Colombia, which sits in the headwater drainage of the Orinoco River. That mismatch in location was the first clue that the plants in the photograph could be something undescribed.

Magdalena checked the area with satellite imagery and found Victoria pads visible in the Inirida and its surrounding lakes, and Harris confirmed that the plants in the satellite images were the same ones he had photographed. Magdalena then contacted Mauricio Bernal at the Jardin Botanico de Bogota, and the two gardens worked with members of Indigenous reserves along the Atabapo River and nearby areas to plan a field trip. The planning took close to two years before an expedition to Inirida was ready, and the search that followed depended heavily on local knowledge of the river system.

A midnight boat ride to a flowering plant

The expedition lasted five days in flooded rainforest, and for most of it the team seemed likely to return empty handed. The researchers first located two individual plants, but neither was in flower, and that mattered because botanists need a flower to prepare a fertile herbarium voucher, the pressed specimen used to distinguish one species from another by comparison with existing collections. The plants they found also appeared to be struggling with high water levels during a late and intense rainy season. With a return flight to Bogota scheduled for the following morning, the team was running out of time when Gustavo Melo, the expedition boatman from the Indigenous Tucano community, said he knew where more of the plants could be found.

The group set off at 1 a.m., travelling away from the airport and deeper into the flooded forest in darkness, and reached a small lake just before sunrise. There they found a second population of five additional plants, including one in flower, giving them the material needed to begin the formal scientific description of the Victoria colombiana waterlily. In total the team documented seven plants across two lakes before rushing back to make the flight. The specimens were deposited at the herbarium of the Jardin Botanico de Bogota, and the taxonomic work was carried out with supervision from plant taxonomist Maarten Christenhusz. The description was published in the journal Phytotaxa, and the paper names the plant the Victoria colombiana waterlily, making it the fourth scientifically described species in the genus Victoria. Its pads measure up to 2 meters across, putting it among the largest waterlilies known, alongside its relatives Victoria amazonica, Victoria cruziana and Victoria boliviana.

A rare plant with a narrow range

Later analysis of geographic information by Carlos A. Pedraza-Penalosa of DreamGIS Colombia revealed a third lake where the Victoria colombiana waterlily is present, and comparisons of satellite images suggested more plants could become visible in drier seasons when water levels drop. That seasonal change cuts both ways for researchers, since the terrain is easier to navigate by boat while the forest is flooded than on foot when water levels fall. At present the team estimates there are between 30 and 50 individual plants in the wild, a provisional figure based on the documented populations and satellite work rather than a complete count. The team is working toward an official assessment of the Victoria colombiana waterlily as critically endangered, though no formal listing has been made yet.

Conservation plans for the Victoria colombiana waterlily now focus on finding unknown populations of the Victoria colombiana waterlily through more thorough satellite scanning and on collecting seeds for cultivation in Bogota, where researchers can study the Victoria colombiana waterlily under controlled conditions. If that cultivation succeeds, the Victoria colombiana waterlily could one day be grown at Kew alongside its relatives. The team is also considering establishing a naturalized population in a more accessible lake within Indigenous territory, which could support local ecotourism while providing an additional safeguarded population outside the remote natural habitat. For now, the survival of the Victoria colombiana waterlily depends on a small number of lakes in eastern Colombia and on the researchers and local guides who know how to reach them.

Read the full report on the discovery and the Phytotaxa paper describing the species. Related GenZ NewZ coverage includes the sequenced genome of an endangered Chinese tree and the hidden drought mode found in plant roots.