Botanists name a new giant water lily that was first spotted on Instagram
This plant’s leaves are so wide that they show up in satellite images. Even so, it had no scientific name until an American nursery owner posted photos of himself swimming next to it in a river in Colombia. On 9 October 2026, botanists published a paper describing it as a new species, Victoria colombiana, which means the Colombian giant water lily. They warn that perhaps only 30 to 50 of these plants are still growing in the wild.
The man in the photos is Jeremiah Harris, who owns a nursery for carnivorous plants in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He had visited the Inírida region in the east of Colombia, which lies in the department of Guainía. When he posted his pictures, he described the plant as Victoria amazonica, the famous giant water lily that grows in the Amazon. The new species has leaves that float on the water and can reach 2 metres across. Only three other members of its genus, the group of closely related species it belongs to, are known.
The person who noticed what Harris had missed was Carlos Magdalena. He works as a botanical and scientific research horticulturist, a specialist in growing plants for science, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom. According to the environmental news site Mongabay, the story began in 2021, when Magdalena happened to see the photos. He knew that nobody had ever recorded a South American giant water lily in the Orinoco Basin. He also knew that the Inírida River belongs to the Orinoco river system, not to the Amazon. “So the moment I saw the picture on Instagram with a geolocation on Inírida I realized it was remarkable,” he told Mongabay in an email.
Magdalena was the right person to spot the mistake, because he has studied the genus Victoria for more than twenty years. In 2022 he was one of the authors of a study that reorganised the genus. That study also named another new species, Victoria boliviana, from Bolivia. The paper explained why scientists had understood these giant plants so poorly. The original reference specimens of the two species that were already recognised had been lost or destroyed. In addition, the plants are known to be very difficult to preserve in a herbarium. A herbarium is a collection of dried and pressed plants that botanists use as a kind of reference library. The authors explained that the water lilies are “big, fleshy, covered in prickles and prone to rotting in the dryer.” For this reason, they found only 97 herbarium specimens of V. amazonica and 18 of V. cruziana that had been collected in the wild, even though both species grow across large areas.
However impressive a photograph may be, it is not enough to name a new species. Magdalena’s first step was to contact Harris and ask exactly where the pictures had been taken. Next, he studied satellite images, searching the river and the lakes nearby until he found several Victoria leaves belonging to one plant. Harris confirmed that the plants he could see on the maps were the same ones that local guides had shown him. Magdalena then spent several more years looking at satellite images and gathering the money and official permission he needed before he could examine the plants in person.
When the trip finally happened, it did not last long. Magdalena went on a five-day expedition into the flooded rainforest with a team from the botanical garden in Bogotá and members of local Indigenous reserves. For several days they searched but found nothing. Then their driver told them where they might look. They had only 10 hours left before their flight home. The group left at 1 a.m. and travelled away from the airport, further into the forest. Their guides belonged to the Tucano community, whose members are known for being skilled at finding their way through these waters. The forest was dense and under water, and in that area they could not depend on GPS or a phone signal.
Shortly before the sun came up, they arrived at a small lake. There they found five of the plants, and one of them was flowering. Altogether, the team recorded seven plants in two lakes. After that, they rushed 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. “Coming across something like this is absolutely totally fascinating, it’s jaw dropping.”
Finding a flower was important. Tech Times, a technology news website, says that Gustavo Melo knew the waterways and where the plants grew. Without his knowledge, it argues, the expedition would very probably have failed to find the flowering specimen that the scientists needed. Melo is one of five people named as collectors of the type specimen. This is the one plant that now officially defines the species. It was collected on 28 July 2024 at Cejal Lake, in the El Paujil Indigenous Reserve in Inírida, by Mauricio Bernal, Carlos Magdalena, Nilo Rodríguez, Jaime Hernández and Gustavo Melo.
The specimens were mounted and kept at the herbarium of the Jardín Botánico de Bogotá José Celestino Mutis. The official work of classifying the plant was supervised by Maarten Christenhusz. He is a plant taxonomist, a scientist who names and classifies plants, and he works in Wales for the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland. He is also an honorary research associate at Kew. The species is described in the journal Phytotaxa, and the authors named on the description are Magdalena, Christenhusz and Mauricio Bernal-Rodríguez. The flowers of the new species only last a short time. One of the features that makes it different from the others is its ovary, the part of the flower that contains the seeds. The ovary is roughly the shape of a cube, has short, bendable prickles and has sides that curve inwards. The name simply refers to the country where the plant grows.
“New species are found all the time, but few are as large, spectacular and emblematic as this one,” Christenhusz said. “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. We can only conserve what we know exists, and discoveries like this show why exploring and understanding the natural world is so important.”
So how could something so big remain 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.” Tech Times points out that the paper does not rule out more populations that nobody has found yet in the Orinoco river area. Its complex network of rivers and lakes could keep them hidden. The team that described the species says that searching satellite images for single plants will be a key part of looking for them.
Harris has now become one of the authors of the study. He told The Guardian that his friends always made fun of him for taking selfies with plants. He said it was “incredible” that this particular photo had led to the discovery of a new species. “I was just so excited, absolutely elated,” he said.
The plant was given its name and recognised as rare at nearly the same time. The researchers think that between 30 and 50 plants grow in the wild. The team intends to ask the International Union for Conservation of Nature to list the species as critically endangered. One of the conditions that can place a species in this category is a population thought to contain fewer than 250 adult plants. If the listing is approved, it will be the first official international conservation status the plant has ever had.
“Now that we know this water lily exists, our responsibility is to understand it better and protect it,” Magdalena said. “With so many plants in the wild threatened with extinction, we simply cannot wait any longer to take action.”
Some steps have already been planned. One idea is to start a population in a lake that is easier to get to but still inside Indigenous territory. This could support local ecotourism, and it would give the species a protected group of plants away from the remote place where it grows now. Magdalena said that his team is trying to collect seeds so that plants can be grown in botanic gardens and close to the Indigenous communities. The plan is to grow the plant in Bogotá and, if that succeeds, possibly at Kew one day. Magdalena does not think the plant will make this easy for them. “Giant waterlilies give away their secrets slowly,” he said. “We believe we know everything but the reality is we don’t, there’s lots of things still to be discovered and protected.”