Giant water lily first seen on Instagram is new species
Its leaves are wide enough to be picked out in satellite images, yet the plant had no scientific name until an American nursery owner posted photos of himself swimming beside 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 posted them after a visit to the Inírida region of eastern Colombia, in the department of Guainía, 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 genus.
The person who saw what Harris had missed was Carlos Magdalena, a botanical and scientific research horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom. According to Mongabay, the story began in 2021, when he came across the photos. Magdalena knew that no species of South American giant water lily had 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.
Magdalena was well placed to notice. 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 and named another new species, Victoria boliviana, from Bolivia. That paper explained why these giants had been so poorly understood. The original reference specimens for the two recognised species had been lost or destroyed, and the plants themselves are notoriously hard to preserve for a herbarium, the collection of dried, pressed plants that botanists use as a reference library: they are “big, fleshy, covered in prickles and prone to rotting in the dryer.” As a result, the authors counted only 97 wild-collected herbarium specimens of V. amazonica and 18 of V. cruziana, despite the wide areas in which those species grow.
A photograph, however striking, was not enough to name a species. Magdalena first contacted Harris to find out exactly where the pictures had been taken. He then turned to satellite imagery, scanning the river and the nearby lakes until he spotted several Victoria pads from a single plant. Harris confirmed that the plants visible on the maps were the same ones local guides had shown him. It took several years more of studying satellite images and gathering the money and permits before Magdalena could check 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 searched without success. 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., travelling away from the airport and deeper into the forest. The guides came from the Tucano community, which is known for its skill in finding the way through these waters. The forest was thick and flooded, and neither GPS nor a mobile signal could be relied on there.
Just before sunrise they reached a small lake and found five of the plants, one of them in flower. In all, the team documented seven plants across two lakes, then hurried back and made 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.”
The flower mattered. Tech Times, a technology news site, argues that without the knowledge of Gustavo Melo, who knew the waterways and where the plants grew, the expedition would almost certainly have ended without the flowering specimen the scientists needed. Melo is one of five people listed as collectors of the type specimen, the single plant that now officially defines the species. That specimen 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 stored at the herbarium of the Jardín Botánico de Bogotá José Celestino Mutis. The formal work of classification was supervised by Maarten Christenhusz, a plant taxonomist working in Wales for the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland and an honorary research associate at Kew. The species is described in the journal Phytotaxa under the names of Magdalena, Christenhusz and Mauricio Bernal-Rodríguez. Its flowers last only a short time, and among the features that set it apart is the ovary, roughly cube-shaped, with short, flexible prickles and sunken sides. The name simply honours the country where it 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.”
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.” Tech Times notes that the paper leaves open the possibility of further, undiscovered populations in the Orinoco watershed, whose complicated pattern of rivers and lakes could hide them. The team behind the description 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 ended in the discovery of a new species. “I was just so excited, absolutely elated,” he said.
The species was named and declared rare at almost the same moment. The researchers estimate that 30 to 50 plants grow in the wild, and the team plans to ask the International Union for Conservation of Nature to list it as critically endangered. A population estimated at fewer than 250 mature individuals is one of the criteria that can qualify a species for that category, and the listing would give the plant 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. “With so many plants in the wild threatened with extinction, we simply cannot wait any longer to take action.”
Some of that action is already planned. One idea is to establish a population in a lake that is easier to reach, still within Indigenous territory, which could support local ecotourism and give the species a protected group of plants away from its remote home. Magdalena said his team is trying to collect seeds to grow plants in botanic gardens and near the Indigenous communities. The aim is to cultivate the plant in Bogotá and, if that works, perhaps one day at Kew. Magdalena does not expect the plant to make it easy. “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.”