Known Giant Waterlily Species Nearly Double to Five — SkimNews
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- Giant waterlilies (genus Victoria) have gone from two known species — V. amazonica and V. cruziana, the only ones recognized for decades — to five, with three new species described in recent years.
- Carlos Magdalena of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, first noticed differences in waterlilies grown from Bolivian seeds in 2016, leading to the 2022 description of Victoria boliviana with leaves even larger than the other known species.
- Victoria colombiana was identified after Jeremiah Harris, who runs a US carnivorous plant business, posted photos in 2021 of waterlilies near the Inírida river in Colombia — a region scientists had believed hosted no giant waterlilies and one geographically separated from the Amazon for millions of years.
- The expedition nearly failed to find flowering specimens until guide Gustavo Melo of the Indigenous Tucano community led the team by boat through the dark to a small lake just before sunrise on their final night, where they found five plants including flowering ones.
- V. colombiana differs from V. amazonica in the orientation of defensive spines beneath its leaves and in the shape of its flowers and fruits, with spine variations linked to which herbivores — manatees or plant-eating fish — are most prevalent in its habitat.
- V. colombiana's entire known range is a single small area, meaning a single event such as a pollution spill could wipe out the species, though the team plans to collect seeds to help ensure its survival.
- A fifth species, Victoria mattogrossensis, from the Pantanal region of South America, will be described in a forthcoming paper after genetic studies revealed it is distinct from V. cruziana despite looking very similar.
Why it matters: Finding three new species of plants with leaves up to 3 metres wide — including one only identifiable through a social media post, satellite imagery, and Indigenous local knowledge — shows how much remains undescribed even among the world's most conspicuous plants, while V. colombiana's single-location range makes it immediately vulnerable to extinction from a single pollution event.
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