Victoria colombiana: Giant Waterlily Spotted in an Instagram Selfie

A botanist scrolling Instagram has just handed science a new species. This week, researchers formally named Victoria colombiana, a giant waterlily from eastern Colombia, in the journal Phytotaxa, according to Gizmodo. The entire discovery traces back to a selfie posted in December 2021 by Jeremiah Harris, a carnivorous plant nursery owner in the United States, who had posed beside an enormous waterlily while visiting the Inírida region. Harris assumed the plant was the familiar giant Amazon waterlily, Victoria amazonica. Carlos Magdalena, a horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, saw the photo and thought otherwise.

The geography did not add up. Victoria amazonica was not thought to grow naturally anywhere near the Inírida River, so Magdalena began to suspect that Harris had accidentally photographed a species unknown to science. Magdalena checked satellite imagery of the region and confirmed that Victoria plants did appear there, then contacted Harris, who said the images matched the plants he had seen. That exchange set off a collaboration that would take almost two years to reach the water.

A five-day hunt for one flower

Magdalena teamed up with Mauricio Bernal-Rodriguez, a researcher at a botanical garden in Bogotá, along with members of local indigenous communities, to mount an expedition to the Inírida region. The trip lasted five days, and at first it looked like a bust. After days of searching, the team had found only two waterlilies, and neither one was in bloom. That detail mattered enormously: botanists need a flowering plant to prepare the fertile herbarium voucher, the pressed and dried specimen that lets them reliably separate a new species from its close relatives.

Salvation arrived on the final night. With the help of local boatman Gustavo Melo, the team located a second batch of the waterlilies, and this time one plant was in flower. The researchers ended up identifying seven individual plants across two lakes, then barely made it back in time to catch their flight home. Magdalena later told Gizmodo that the find depended on many kinds of knowledge, from indigenous expertise to horticulturists in two countries to satellite surveying, and that some of the most important technology involved sat in an ordinary pocket, in the form of Instagram and WhatsApp.

From a photo to a pressed specimen

Back in the lab, the team deposited specimens at the JBB Herbarium of the Jardín Botánico de Bogotá José Celestino Mutis in Colombia and began the taxonomic analysis, with help from plant taxonomist Maarten Christenhusz of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland. Christenhusz said that new species turn up regularly, but few are as large, spectacular and emblematic as this one, Discover Wildlife reported, adding that Victoria colombiana is big enough to be spotted from space. The paper formally names the plant Victoria colombiana, and it also argues that another waterlily, Victoria mattogrossensis, deserves recognition as its own distinct species, which would bring the genus to five known species. Harris, Melo, the indigenous members of the expedition, Bernal-Rodriguez and Magdalena all appear as authors on the paper.

Plants hiding in plain sight keep surprising botanists. A felled landmark tree in Britain recently sprouted new life from its stump years after it was cut down, and a mass flowering in the Atacama Desert woke up two hundred species at once. Victoria colombiana belongs in that company: a spectacular organism that science simply had not noticed.

Thirty to fifty plants, and a race to save them

The celebration comes with an alarm. The researchers estimate that only thirty to fifty individual Victoria colombiana plants exist in the wild, and they are working toward an official Critically Endangered assessment on the IUCN Red List. Satellite imagery suggests a third lake may hold more plants, which would become visible in drier seasons when water levels drop, though reaching them is harder then, since boats move through the forest more easily than feet do.

The team has a plan. Researchers hope to establish a population of Victoria colombiana in lakes closer to indigenous residents who can monitor the plants, and to cultivate seeds at the botanical gardens in Bogotá, with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew as a possible later home. Sustained planting efforts can work when they get attention and care, as New York City's tree-planting boom has shown. For now, Victoria colombiana remains one of the rarest plants on Earth, discovered because one tourist took a selfie and one botanist refused to scroll past it.