The team was preparing to fly back to Bogotá at 9 a.m. when, at 11 p.m., Magdalena described their plight to Gustavo Melo, a boatman from the Indigenous Tucano community, known for steering through flooded forest by memory. Melo said he knew exactly where to find more plants.

With ten hours before their flight, the group launched a small boat at 1 a.m. into pitch-black rainforest. Just before sunrise, they reached a small jungle lake and found five more V. colombiana plants, including one in flower. They documented seven individuals across two lakes in total, then raced back to catch the plane.

How rare is the new water lily?

Subsequent analysis using geographic information systems, software that maps landscape features from aerial imagery, by Carlos A. Pedraza-Penalosa of DreamGIS Colombia turned up a third lake. The team now estimates that 30 to 50 individual V. colombiana plants exist in the wild, a population size that signals serious extinction risk. Researchers are preparing an application for an IUCN Red List assessment and expect the species to qualify as critically endangered.

Magdalena framed the find in stark terms: "This is one of those extraordinary stories where Indigenous and horticultural knowledge, with the help of social media and technology, came together to uncover a truly extraordinary botanical achievement. It is also a reminder that nature is still full of surprises and wonder. Now that we know this water lily exists, our responsibility is to understand it better and protect it. With so many plants in the wild threatened with extinction, we simply cannot wait any longer to take action."

Plant taxonomist Maarten Christenhusz, who classifies and names species, supervised the description and added: "New species are found all the time, but few are as large, spectacular and emblematic as this one. This new giant water lily can even be seen from space, which is a striking reminder of how much we still don't know about life on our planet. We can only conserve what we know exists."

What happens next?

Researchers plan to refine their population count by scanning better satellite imagery, particularly during dry seasons when additional pads should emerge as water levels drop. Reaching the plants in the dry season is harder, however, because boats can glide over flooded forest in the wet months but the same terrain turns to difficult ground on foot.

Conservation work is also underway. The team is exploring whether a small, accessible lake within Indigenous territory could host a naturalized population, creating a backup reserve outside the species' remote range and supporting local ecotourism.

Longer term, researchers hope to collect seeds and grow V. colombiana in Bogotá. If cultivation succeeds, the lily could eventually join its three cousins, V. amazonica, V. cruziana, and V. boliviana, in the displays at Kew Gardens.

The taxonomic work was led by Magdalena with Bernal and Christenhusz, with herbarium specimens deposited at the Jardín Botánico de Bogotá. The paper appeared in Phytotaxa under DOI 10.11646/phytotaxa.778.2.1.