In December 2021 Jeremiah Harris, who runs a carnivorous plant nursery in Colorado Springs, posted a photo of himself beside some huge lily pads on the Inirida River in Guainia, eastern Colombia, and labelled them Victoria amazonica, the giant waterlily of the Amazon. Half a world away at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Carlos Magdalena, a horticulturist who has spent his working life with giant waterlilies, saw the picture and paused. No Victoria had ever been recorded on the Inirida, which flows to the Orinoco rather than the Amazon. He opened satellite images of the river and its lakes and scanned them until he found the pads of a single plant, plainly visible from space, and Harris confirmed they were the ones his local guides had shown him. Magdalena wrote to Mauricio Bernal at the Jardin Botanico de Bogota Jose Celestino Mutis, who grows Victoria in the garden's tropical displays, and together they worked with Nilo Rodriguez, Jaime Hernandez and Gustavo Melo of the Indigenous reserves of the Atabapo River, Caranacoa Yuri Laguna Morocoto and Puinave Piapoco el Paujil. Rodriguez remembered the waterlilies from childhood, though not many of them. Nearly two years of planning later, the expedition set out for five days on the water, and by the fifth day it had found only two plants, neither in flower, and a flower is what botanists need before they can name a species.

Read the full story: Someone Posted an Instagram Selfie. Scientists Spotted a Giant New Species in the Background, by Ed Cara, Gizmodo.

On the last night, with a 9am flight waiting, Magdalena told the boatman Gustavo Melo, from the Tucano community, how close they had come. Melo said he knew where more grew. At 1am they pushed off into the flooded forest and just before sunrise reached a small lake with five more plants, one of them in flower. "After many days looking for it, we managed to find it after sailing all night," Magdalena said. Seven plants, two lakes, and they made the plane. On 7 October 2026 the team named the plant Victoria colombiana in the journal Phytotaxa, with all eight of them as authors, boatman and nursery owner included. Its pads reach two metres across, and a genus that held three species now holds five, because the same paper gives Victoria mattogrossensis a name of its own. Mapping by Carlos Pedraza Penaloza of DreamGIS has since found a third lake, and the team's count so far is 30 to 50 plants in the wild, so it will propose a Critically Endangered listing while it gathers seed to grow in Bogota, perhaps one day at Kew, and talks of a second home in a lake close to the reserves. "We live in a wonderful world where there are many extraordinary forms of life, all of them unique," Magdalena said. "Remarkably some of this tech is in your pocket, be it Instagram or WhatsApp." Maarten Christenhusz, the taxonomist who guided the naming: "New species are found all the time, but few are as large, spectacular and emblematic as this one."

Our short take: the full story is by Ed Cara for Gizmodo (8 October 2026), built on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew press release (9 October 2026) and the paper by Carlos Magdalena and colleagues in Phytotaxa (7 October 2026), with the night boat ride told by Sophie Ellis for BBC Wildlife and Eleanor Higgs for IFLScience (both 9 October 2026).