An Instagram photo helps scientists find a new giant water lily

Its leaves are so wide that they can be seen in satellite images, yet the plant had no scientific name until an American nursery owner posted photos of himself swimming next to it in a Colombian river. On 9 October 2026, botanists published a paper describing it as a new species, Victoria colombiana, the Colombian giant water lily. They warn that only 30 to 50 plants may survive in the wild.

The man in the photos is Jeremiah Harris, who runs a carnivorous plant nursery in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He had visited the Inírida region of eastern Colombia and labelled the plant Victoria amazonica, the well-known giant water lily of the Amazon. The new species has floating leaves up to 2 metres wide, and it is only the fourth known member of its group, or genus.

The person who noticed Harris’s mistake was Carlos Magdalena, a horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom. He came across the photos in 2021. Magdalena knew that no South American giant water lily had ever been reported from the Orinoco Basin, and the Inírida River flows into the Orinoco system, not the Amazon. “So the moment I saw the picture on Instagram with a geolocation on Inírida I realized it was remarkable,” he told Mongabay by email.

He was well placed to notice, having studied these water lilies for more than twenty years. In 2022 he helped name another new species, from Bolivia. That study explained why the giants are so poorly understood: they are very hard to preserve as dried reference specimens, because they are “big, fleshy, covered in prickles and prone to rotting in the dryer.”

A photo alone was not enough to name a species. Magdalena first asked Harris exactly where the pictures had been taken. He then searched satellite images of the river and nearby lakes until he spotted several leaves from a single plant, and Harris confirmed that these were the plants local guides had shown him. It took several more years to raise the money and get permits before Magdalena could see the plants for himself.

When the trip came, it was short. Magdalena joined a team from Bogotá’s botanical garden and members of local Indigenous reserves on a five-day expedition into the flooded rainforest. For days they found nothing. Then their driver gave them a tip about where to look. With only 10 hours left before their flight home, the group set off at 1 a.m., heading away from the airport and deeper into the forest. Their guides came from the Tucano community, which is known for its skill in finding the way through these waters. In that thick, flooded forest, neither GPS nor a mobile signal could be relied on.

Just before sunrise they reached a small lake and found five of the plants, one of them in flower. Altogether the team recorded seven plants in two lakes, then hurried back and caught their flight. “It was so emotional I shed a tear, it was one of those moments that will remain with me for life,” Magdalena told The Guardian.

The flower mattered, because the scientists needed a flowering plant. The news site Tech Times argues that without Gustavo Melo, who knew the waterways and where the plants grew, the expedition would almost certainly have ended without one. The official specimen was collected on 28 July 2024 at Cejal Lake, in the El Paujil Indigenous Reserve. The species is described in the journal Phytotaxa under the names of Magdalena, Maarten Christenhusz and Mauricio Bernal-Rodríguez, and its name simply honours the country where it grows.

Christenhusz, a plant taxonomist who supervised the classification, was clearly impressed. “This new giant water lily can even be seen from space, which is a striking reminder of how much we still don’t know about life on our planet,” he said.

So why did something so large stay unknown for so long? Magdalena told Mongabay that the plant is “incredibly rare and grows in places that are not often visited by people, let alone science.” According to Tech Times, the paper leaves open the possibility that more populations are hidden in the complicated network of rivers and lakes of the Orinoco watershed. The team says searching satellite images for individual plants will be essential in looking for them.

Harris is now one of the study’s authors. He told The Guardian that his friends had always teased him for taking selfies with plants, and that it was “incredible” this one had led to the discovery of a new species. “I was just so excited, absolutely elated,” he said.

The team plans to ask the International Union for Conservation of Nature to list the plant as critically endangered. This would give it its first formal international conservation status. “Now that we know this water lily exists, our responsibility is to understand it better and protect it,” Magdalena said.

One idea is to start a population in a lake that is easier to reach, still within Indigenous territory, which could support local ecotourism. Magdalena’s team is also trying to collect seeds to grow plants in botanic gardens and near the Indigenous communities. The aim is to grow the plant in Bogotá and, if that works, perhaps one day at Kew. Magdalena does not expect it to be easy. “Giant waterlilies give away their secrets slowly,” he said.