Instagram Photo Leads to Discovery of Rare Giant Water Lily Species in Colombia

A photograph posted to Instagram five years ago set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in a midnight boat race through a flooded Colombian rainforest and the formal recognition of a species that science had never documented. The plant in question was a giant water lily, its circular pads stretching up to two meters across, floating in the Inírida River in Colombia's Guainía region—a place where such plants were not supposed to exist.

Carlos Magdalena, a water lily specialist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, saw the photograph posted by Jeremiah Harris, an American who runs a carnivorous plant nursery. Harris had taken the image during a trip to the Inírida region and had casually identified it as Victoria amazonica, a species already well known to science. But Magdalena recognized something was wrong. The known range of Victoria water lilies does not extend to the Inírida River, which sits in the headwater drainage of the Orinoco, South America's third-longest river. The geography alone suggested the possibility of an undescribed species.

Magdalena began searching satellite imagery of the Inírida and its surrounding lakes, scanning for the distinctive circular silhouettes of Victoria pads. He found them—multiple plants visible from space, confirming that something worth investigating was growing in that remote corner of the Amazon. He reached out to Mauricio Bernal at the Jardín Botánico de Bogotá and together they began planning an expedition. They worked with Indigenous members of local reserves—Nilo Rodríguez, Jaime Hernández, and Gustavo Melo—who knew the territory and its waterways. Rodríguez recalled seeing the water lilies as a child but said he had not observed many in recent years. Nearly two years of preparation followed before the team was ready to depart.

When they finally reached the Inírida, the expedition seemed destined to fail. By the fifth day, with their return flight to Bogotá scheduled for 9 a.m., they had located only two individual plants—and neither was flowering. A flowering specimen was essential. Botanists rely on pressed and dried plant material, called herbarium vouchers, to formally describe and distinguish species from one another. Without a flower, they had no way to complete the scientific work. The water levels were high and the rainy season had been intense, making the plants appear stressed.

That night, at 11 p.m., Magdalena explained their predicament to Gustavo Melo, the expedition's boatman from the Indigenous Tucano community, a group known for exceptional navigational skill. Melo said he knew exactly where to find more specimens. With ten hours remaining before their flight, the team departed at 1 a.m., heading away from the airport and deeper into the flooded rainforest in complete darkness, trusting Melo's knowledge of the terrain. Just before sunrise, they reached a small lake in the middle of the jungle. There they found a second population containing five additional water lilies—and one of them was in flower.

The team documented seven plants across two lakes before rushing back to the airport in time for their flight. The specimens were deposited at the herbarium in Bogotá, and the formal scientific work began under the supervision of Maarten Christenhusz, a plant taxonomist working in Wales. The new species was named Victoria colombiana and formally described in the journal Phytotaxa. It joins only three other known species in the genus Victoria—a remarkably small family for plants so large and distinctive.

Satellite analysis revealed a third lake where the water lily was present, and the team estimates between 30 and 50 individual plants exist in the wild. The species is extremely rare and faces extinction. The terrain that makes the plants accessible by boat during high water becomes nearly impassable on foot when water levels drop in the dry season, creating a paradox for conservation efforts. The team is pursuing an official assessment of the species as critically endangered and is working toward long-term protection, including the possibility of establishing a naturalized population in a more accessible lake within Indigenous territory. Efforts are also underway to collect seeds and cultivate plants in Bogotá, with the hope that one day Victoria colombiana might grow alongside its cousins at Kew Gardens.