London (CNN)The giantwater lilyat theRoyal Botanical Gardenin London may belong Discovered After spending 177 years in the garden botanical garden, it became a whole new species.
Victoria Boliviana is the world's largest known water lily species, with wild leaves growing nearly 10 feet wide, according to a press release from a garden in Kew, western London. .. The largest specimens of this species can be found in the Larin Konada Gardens in Bolivia and are up to 10.5 feet wide.
Giant water lily leaves belonging to one of the three species of the genus Victoria can support a weight of at least 176 pounds.
Studies have shown that the newly identified species, V. boliviana, is generally misbelieved to be Victoria amazonica, one of two previously known giant water lilies. Was there.
The loss of live specimens of the original species and the lack of a biological collection of giant water lilies have led to disagreements over the number of recognized species, and the names of most species. Was not correct. 19th and 20th centuries. The purpose of the study was to improve the knowledge of Victoria water lilies.
Kew's Scientific and Botanical Research Gardener Carlos Magdalena, Botanical Artist Lucy Smith, Biodiversity Genomics Researcher Natalia Purzero Musca and an international team, Bolivia National Botanical Garden, Santa Cruz de la Sierra Botanical Garden, La Rinkonada Garden discovered a giant water lily for the first time in over a century. The
team has made breakthroughs through editing all existing information from historical records, gardening and geography, assembling a dataset of species characteristics, and analyzing DNA. rice field.
Kew is the only place in the world to grow all three Victoria species side by side, and Magdalena states that species can be compared and grown there in ways not possible in the wild. A vast area.
In this study, V. boliviana is genetically different from the other two species, but V. It is most closely related to cruziana, and it was found that the two species may have diverged about 1 million years ago.
"I've been scrutinizing all the pictures of wild Victorian water lilies over the internet for almost 20 years, which most botanists in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries It's a luxury that wasn't there. " After looking at pictures of plants online, Magdalena suspected that there was a third species since 2006.
"I learned a lot in the process of officially naming this new species, which is the greatest achievement of my 20-year career in Queue," he said.
Giant water lilies can be seen at the Water Lily House and Princess of Wales Conservatory in Cue Gardens.
