Africa's largest lake and the world's largest tropical lake, shared by Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania — the long-sought source of the White Nile, a prize in the Victorian scramble for Africa, the cradle of one of evolution's most extraordinary bursts of speciation, and the scene of one of the largest human-caused extinctions of recent times.
Africa holds a body of water so large that early European explorers refused to believe a single lake could be so vast. When the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached it in 1858, he named it for Queen Victoria and declared it the source of the Nile — a claim his rival Richard Burton furiously denied and that would take years to confirm. But the most remarkable story at Lake Victoria had nothing to do with empire. Beneath its shallow waters lived hundreds of fish species found nowhere else on earth, born from a single ancestor through one of the fastest bursts of evolution ever documented. Then a single introduced predator — the Nile perch — swept through, and within decades a large share of that evolutionary world had vanished or come close to extinction.