The leaf of the giant water lily, which belongs to one of the three species of the genus Victoria, can support a weight of at least 176 kg. “Having this new data on Victoria and identifying a new species in the genus is an incredible achievement in botany – correctly identifying and documenting plant diversity is vital to its conservation and sustainable benefit.” said Alex Monro, taxonomist, systematist and field. botanist at Kew and senior author of the study published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science, in the press release. The new species, V. boliviana, is commonly and mistakenly believed to be Victoria amazonica, one of two previously known species of giant water lily, according to the study. The loss of living specimens of the original species, as well as the lack of biological collections of giant water lilies, led to disputes over the number of recognized species and species misnaming for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. The aim of the study was to improve knowledge of Victoria water lilies. An international team led by Kew scientific and botanical research horticulturist Carlos Magdalena, botanical artist Lucy Smith and genomic biodiversity researcher Natalia Przelomska, along with collaborators from the National Herbarium of Bolivia, the Santa Cruz de La Sierra Botanical Garden and the La Rinconada, made the first discovery of a giant water lily in more than a century. The team made the breakthrough by pulling together all existing information from historical records, horticulture and geography, compiling a dataset of species characteristics and through DNA analysis. Kew is the only place in the world that grows all three Victoria species together side by side, which Magdalena said allowed the species to be compared in a way impossible in the wild, where they grow over vast areas. The study found that V. boliviana is genetically distinct from the other two species, but more closely related to V. cruziana, and that the two species may have diverged about a million years ago. “For almost two decades, I’ve been scrutinizing every photo of wild Victoria water lilies on the internet, a luxury that a botanist from the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th centuries didn’t have,” said Magdalena, who suspected there was a third species. since 2006 after seeing a photo of the plant online. “I learned so much in the process of officially naming this new species and it was the biggest achievement of my 20-year career at Kew,” he said. The giant waterlily can be seen at Waterlily House and the Princess of Wales Conservatory in Kew Gardens.
