A man’s Instagram photos help scientists find a new water lily

An American man swam next to a very big water lily in a river in Colombia, and he put the photos on Instagram. Now scientists say the plant is a new species, a new kind of plant. In October 2026, they gave it a name: Victoria colombiana. They think only 30 to 50 of these plants live in the wild.

The man is Jeremiah Harris. He has a shop in Colorado Springs, in the United States, and he grows and sells plants there. He visited the Inírida area in eastern Colombia. He thought the plant was the famous giant water lily from the Amazon. The new plant has leaves on the water, and they can be 2 metres wide.

Carlos Magdalena works at Kew, a big garden in the United Kingdom. In 2021 he saw the photos. He knew that the Inírida River goes into the Orinoco River, not the Amazon. Nobody found giant water lilies there before, so the photos were very interesting to him. He studied these plants for more than twenty years.

First, Magdalena asked Harris where he took the photos. Then he looked at photos of the river from space, and he saw the big leaves of a plant. He needed some years to get the money and the papers for a trip.

The trip was five days long. Magdalena went into the forest with a team from Bogotá and local Indigenous people. There was water everywhere in the forest. For days they found nothing. Then their driver told them where to look. They had only 10 hours before their flight home. They left at 1 a.m., and guides from the Tucano community showed them the way.

Before sunrise, they came to a small lake. They found five plants there, and one plant had a flower. In total they saw seven plants in two lakes. Then they hurried back and caught their flight. Magdalena told The Guardian that he cried because the moment was so special.

Harris now helps write the study. He said his friends always laughed at his selfies with plants. He said the discovery was “incredible”.

The scientists want to protect the plant. They are trying to collect seeds. They want to grow plants in gardens and near the homes of the Indigenous people. First they will try to grow it in Bogotá. Maybe one day it will grow at Kew too.