World’s Biggest Water Lily is a Species of its Own

An artist’s observations, two botanists’ suspicions, and DNA tests reveal a case of mistaken identity among giant water plants.

When 19th-century European botanists encountered impressive water lilies with leaves more extensive than a pingpong table, they initially thought these South American plants constituted simply one species.

Very soon, they comprehended that the Victoria genus– named after the contemporaneous British monarch– composed of two species, V. amazonica and V. cruziana.

Currently, researchers have found there are three types, and a specimen of the freshly identified kind, V. boliviana, growing in La Rinconada Gardens in Bolivia, holds the world record for leaf size at 3.2 meters across.

Botanists both at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which has had a living sample of this plant for 177 years, and at National Herbarium of Bolivia, which gathered its own sample 34 years ago, questioned whether it could not be V. amazonica or V. cruziana, because the shape, shade, and size of its leaves, flowers, and seeds seemed a mix of the two species, particularly after a botanical artist documented those distinctions when she illustrated the two day flowering of these nighttime bloomers.

Because of their size and fleshiness, these water lilies are notoriously complicated to gather, maintain, and research. Researchers finally obtained DNA samples from preserved herbarium and a few fresh specimens of the three species.

They also utilized released genomic and gene activity data on V. cruziana. The genetic evaluation found DNA insertions and deletions in the chloroplasts that established V. boliviana as a different new species; they reported on 4 July in Frontiers in Plant Science.

Indigenous individuals have long had local titles for the two identified species: “auapé-yaponna,” for V. amazonica, which they utilize to make a black hair dye, and “yrupé,” “yacare yrupé,” or “naanók lapotó” for V. cruziana, whose seeds might be a substitute for maize. It is unclear whether they recognized V. boliviana as its own species.

Journal reference:

Frontiers in Plant Science, DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2022.883151

Read the original article on Science.