After 177 years, researchers have identified that the huge water lily – a genus of aquatic plants – present in the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, in London belongs to an entirely new species.
Named the “Bolivian Victoria,” the plant is the largest known water lily species in the world, with leaves growing to nearly 10 feet wide, about 3 meters, in the wild, according to a press release from the garden in Kew, west of London.
The largest specimen of the new species can be found at Jardins La Rinconada, in Bolivia with leaves up to 10.5 feet wide, approximately 3.2 meters.
The giant water lily leaf, which belongs to one of the three species of the genus Victoria, can support a weight of at least 80 kilograms.
“Having this new data for Victoria and identifying a new species in the genus is an incredible achievement in botany – properly defining and documenting plant diversity is crucial to protecting and sustainably benefiting from it,” said Alex Monro, taxonomist and senior author of the study published this Monday (4) in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
The newly identified species, V. boliviana, was commonly and erroneously thought of as Victoria Amazonica, popularly known as the water lily and one of two previously known species of giant water lily, according to the study.
The loss of live specimens of the original species, as well as the scarcity of biological collections of giant water lilies, resulted in disagreements over the number of recognized species and incorrect nomenclature during 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 biodiversity genomics researcher Natalia Przelomska, along with partners from the National Herbarium of Bolivia, Jardim Botânico de Santa Cruz de La Sierra and La Rinconada Garden, made the first discovery of a giant water lily in over a century.
The team made the discovery by compiling all existing information from historical records, horticulture and geography, pulling together 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 allows them to be compared in a way that is not possible in the wild, where they grow over vast areas.
The study found that V. boliviana is genetically different from the other two species, but closer to V. cruziana, and they may have diverged about a million years ago.
“For nearly two decades I have been scrutinizing every photo of wild water lilies on the internet, a luxury that a botanist of the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th century did not have,” said Magdalena, who had suspected there was a third species since 2006 later. to see a photo of the plant online.
“I learned a lot 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 water lily can be seen at Waterlily House and Princess of Wales Conservatory.
Source: CNN Brasil
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