Water lily flowers are common in Maya art
Posted October 14, 2019
A significant portion of my PhD dissertation was on iconography of water lily flowers and seedpods in Classic Maya art. Lake Sacnab (adjacent to Lake Yaxha) means white water lily. You can also find water lilies en masse in Rio San Pedro, especially downstream from Naranjo village. Peten (biologist Mirtha Cano and Nicholas Hellmuth studied Nymphaea there several years ago). We also studied Nymphaea at the east end of Lake Peten Itza.
Two excellent places to find “thousands” of native water lilies are Arroyo Pucte (tributary of Rio Pasion) and the water areas near Monterrico, parallel to the Pacific Ocean. We have done lots of field trips to study these two water lily ecosystems in past decades.
Last week we were visiting Julian Mariona and his family at his hotel Posada Caribe, along the Arroyo Petexbatun and found a few areas of water lilies in this stream and in Lake Petexbatun.
Pollution caused by African palm tree plantations and other commercial agriculture pesticides, plastic garbage dumped into rivers, plus soap from washing clothes in the streams by villagers, causes problems for wetlands vegetation, so it was nice that at least a few water lilies were still present in Arroyo Petex Batun and Laguna Petex Batun.
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Photo taken by Nicholas Hellmuth near hotel in Laguna Petexbatun with a Nikon D810 with a Nikon AF-Micro-NIKKOR 200mm f/4D IF-ED Macro lens. |
