On the first modern ecologist, Maria Sibylla Merian.
She was the Saturday brunch topic of conversation I had with my friends over Belgian waffles, coffee and hash before I and my umbrella embarked on the trek to the University library. Up and down stairs and escalators, I filled a tote bag full with books. In a bold font, the bag read “lots of stuff i don’t really need.” My friend giggled at it upon reading. But, I did need it’s contents. I wanted to hold her work, run my fingers down the seams of books detailing her life, and view her prints alive like she did her subjects.
After days of staring at them on my laptop screen, I no longer thought the ones and zeros did them justice.
bombyx mori
At barely 13 Maria Sibylla Merian collected wild silkworms that would perish in weeks, likely studying their slow crawl up tree bark in hungry pursuit of dewey mulberry leaves to appease the appetite their imminent metamorphoses ignited. I imagine them writhing along the skin of the young girl, her olive eyes intrigued as they meandered between her fingers. She would intently examine them—small, fat, hairy, and eggshell-pale—details etched into her brain to later be recited in inky watercolor, a thin, precise paintbrush in which to speak with.
A young naturalist, Maria would take them home. In the foreword of her book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, she’d later write:
I spent my time investigating insects. At the beginning, I started with silk worms in my home town of Frankfurt.
They’d be among the other insects she raised. She’d gather them on cabbage leaves and construct paper cones for them to spin their cocoons in. Merian would watch their life cycles like live film, specimens of her own casting. She’d observe them from egg, larvae, pupae, caterpillar, and cocoon-dweller to moth or butterfly. Her goal was to see how they changed.
She painted the moths wrapped in silk maroon cocoons and chrysalis butterflies sequestered in a case the color of chartreuse with unheard of detail. As iterated in the essay Maria Sibylla Merian: The First Ecologist? by biologist Kay Etheridge, in her books, Merian described the pupa as rolled up, “lying as if they were dead.” With her brush, she took notes that would make her the first artist or ecologist to illustrate the ontogenesis of live insects, as well as “draw insects with the plants in which they thrived,” according to Michael Brand and Ed de Heer of the Getty and Rembrandt House Museums respectively. More specifically, in 1660—her first year of teenagedom—these notes would make her the first ecologist… ever.
lepidoptera
In interludes, she roamed gardens and countryside bocages in Nuremberg and Frankfurt. Before her fascination with insects, she painted decorative flowers. She was born into a family of artists: illustrators, painters, and printmakers. But as her obsession loomed, the insects began to infiltrate her textless flowerful artworks.
She married, had two daughters, but her fascination with the natural world never ceased.
As it peaked, in her 20s, Merian would stay up in her bed all night, waiting for hours until caterpillars she housed in boxes emerged from their cocoons (which she called “date pits”) no longer the insects they once were. Once it did, she painted it.
Her caterpillar obsession would cause her to publish an extraordinary book in 1679: Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung, und sonderbare Blumennahrung, or rather The caterpillars wonderful transformation, and strange flower food. This book would be the first work in history to connect art and entomology. The term was first coined by Aristotle in the 4th century, who focused on insect anatomy. However, as Merian progressed, her work would concern the habitats, behaviors, and life of insects and other taxa. She was performing the science of ecology long before the term was used. Ecology describes the “economies” of life forms and studies the relationship between the organisms and their environments; a term minted by an embryologist of Merian’s origin country, Ernst Haeckel in 1866. At the time, he believed in the spontaneous generation of the world’s simplest organisms. In Merian’s time, this theory was widely accepted for small organisms like insects and rodents. Maggots simply appeared from rotten meat and molding cheese, mice grew out of aging loaves of bread, and worms materialized from the mud. Her work, specifically her lifecycle illustrations, would later be regarded as groundbreaking in dispelling this myth.
rhopalocera
Merian’s sights stretched farther than the German gardens and the borders of Amsterdam where she later moved with her family. They stretched to South America, landing in the hot, wet land of Suriname. Modernly, the continent’s smallest independent country, it was at the time a Dutch colony. She yearned to study the exotic flora and fauna, observe the ants and spiders, and capture the lives of tropical butterflies and beetles. And she did. It was June in the last month of the seventeenth century. Taking her youngest daughter, Dorothea Maria, as an accomplice, they took a ferry to the island of Texel off the coast of Amsterdam. Likely carrying suitcases upon suitcases of luggage, they boarded a voyage across the Zuyder Zee, and onto the Atlantic, landing in Guyana.
Merian was 52.
It would be the publication of this book that would bring her widespread fame. In addition to insects, it contained illustrations of lizards, snakes, birds, crocodiles, and foliage untouched by the eyes of Europeans. Accompanying many paintings were texts, either merely observational or acutely ethnographical.
As written by Kay Etheridge in the aforementioned essay, she embarked on an exploration for entirely scientific purposes before it became fashionable. She financed the trip herself by selling her drawings. I humorly imagine her in her thick layers of European skirts trekking through the vast rainforests of Suriname, a journal and paints in tow.
Originally intended as a 5-year expedition, the trip was cut short. Merian and her daughter returned after 3 years after she fell ill, possibly contracting malaria or yellow fever.
Still, she persisted after returning to Amsterdam in the summer of 1701. There are some mistakes in the book due to the last specimens painted from memory. Nonetheless, it was a feat: a folio of sixty copperplate paintings. Merian’s work looks alive in this book. The creatures appear breathing. The leaves are holey food. The jungle is animated.
A frog’s entire life is illustrated on a single page. Captivated, my eyes watch it grow from tadpole to a froglet to an adult amphibian.
Leggy spiders guard eggs. A tarantula feasts on a hummingbird. A crocodile wrestles a snake. An army of ants scale the stem of a guava tree. Florid butterflies swarm around flowers, regaled with nectar.
Most European butterflies didn’t even have scientific names prior to Merian’s study. Though, she wasn’t interested in classification, “only in the formation, propagation, and metamorphosis of creatures… and the nature of their diet,” as she told one European collector.
The full title of Darwin’s manifesto is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. One hundred years before it’s publication, that’s what Merian depicted: a constant struggle to survive and the cycle in which organisms thrive and flourish. It was needless to say, ahead of its time. Or perhaps, it was just what her time needed: an ecological collection forwarding the vogue field, and allowing modern researchers to compare the ecological makeup of then to now, a necessary mechanism for studying historical biodiversity trends.
She was in debt towards the end of her life. While acclaimed, her book did not make as much as she hoped. So Merian and her daughters continued to sell paintings. She painted until her hands no longer let her after she was paralyzed by a stroke in 1715.
In 1717 she died just before her seventieth birthday. On the day of her funeral, all of her remaining watercolors were bought by the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great. Her daughter, Dorothea Maria would be brought on as his official scientific illustrator, carrying on the legacy of her mother.