In 1699, the artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian left Amsterdam on a boat bound for Surinam, a country on the northeast shoulder of South America. Relying on the help and knowledge of African slaves and Amerindians, she traveled to the farthest plantation up the Surinam River and then into the rain forest to make sketches and observations for her masterwork, The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, published in 1705. Images from that book are shown in the gallery here, published with the permission of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The original publication contained 60 plates—others were added after Merian's death.

The following is an excerpt from the new biography of the pioneering scientist, Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd (Harcourt, 2007).

The itch of curiosity spurred Merian on, and eventually the rain forest, even past this most remote plantation edge, was too tempting. To get there, she relied even more heavily on help. In her Surinam book, she described the labor-intensive entry to the jungle: "The forest grew together so closely with thistles and thorns, I sent slaves with hatchets ahead, so that they chopped an opening for me, in order to go through to some extent, which was nevertheless rather cumbersome."

The trees' sheer size could be a shock to the sense of proportion, towering 150 feet above the forest floor, and Merian suspected that each level might host different insects. Walking the fields of Germany, looking for caterpillars, she checked all the way down the stalks, knowing some crouched close to the ground. The crowns of these giant trees must hold butterflies she could only imagine. Of the swallow-tailed Urania leilus, she wrote, "they fly very fast and high and thus cannot be obtained undamaged except as caterpillars." Sometimes, one dropped, a shiny spark of luck. The lovely Philaethria dido, its wings segmented into panes of green and black, hardly ever descends to the lower realms as an adult. She found its larva in grasses near a pineapple plant.

Eventually she would solve the problem of insects too high to reach by using a ladder to pull down a web of caterpillars near the top of the palm tree. She installed the whole teeming mass in her house to take notes. If the trunk was too unstable, as was the case with one hollow papaya, she requested the tree be cut down so she could search the upper leaves. A tiny white and yellow caterpillar wandered these downed branches and would hatch into a hard-to-find moth she never would have encountered otherwise.

The life in these glades was truly nothing she'd seen before, and she took a stab at capturing it on paper. On a bone-colored branch, its few leaves chewed to tatters, a dark tarantula emerges from a webbed egg, and grasps an ant in its pincers. Other ants scurry, just out of reach. A second tarantula, also black and hairy, lunges over a hummingbird lying prone, throat exposed. The spider is feeding, and one leg dangles into a nest with four eggs that the hummingbird may have been warming moments before. Another spider sits at the center of her tawny web, young spiders fanning out before her toward ants that dwarf them in size. Life barely gets its start before it is preyed upon. An insect, only one wing remaining, is tangled in the web. The ants are hard at work: attacking a plump bug, building a bridge of their bodies to crawl from twig to twig, grasping a fourth spider in what looks like a wicked bite. The dying hummingbird holds most of the brightness in the picture with its red head, blue wings, green body. The spiders, the ants, the web are all in black, and they are winning. It is a world of voraciousness, of consuming hunger. It's hard to tell, sometimes, who is eating whom.

The words accompanying the engraving in the Surinam book underscore the ring of predation. The spiders eat ants, and hummingbirds when they can't find enough ants. Amerindian priests also eat hummingbirds (it's their only food, Merian reports.) Certain kinds of ants "can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night." While the spiders devour the ants, the ants can also gang up and eat a spider. When the mood strikes, they swarm through houses, carpeting the floor, papering the walls, leaving them shining and bare, picking clean any counters and furniture left unprotected. The ant eggs in turn feed Surinamese chickens, which nourish the people. The page depicts a resonant vision of the tropics, moving beyond her observations to interpretation of her experience. The ants are daunting, not because they represent some Biblical evil as they would in one of her stepfather's still life paintings, but because their actual behavior—the excavating eight-foot nests, the swarming—is overwhelming.

Like the lantern fly and morpho butterfly, this spider had a European reputation. In 1666, the Royal Society had drawn up a list of questions pertaining to various regions of the world. For Guiana and Brazil, members wanted to know if it was true that toads can be created by throwing water on the floor, whether the Brazilian locust turns into a plant and another insect turns into a swift-flying bird. For Virginia and Bermuda, they were curious about plants that cause blisters and were eager for "a particular account of the Spider in the Bermudas said to be large and beautiful for its colours: weaving a Web betwixt several Trees, which is affirmed to be of a substance and colour like perfect raw Silk; so strong that Birds, like Snites are snared therein." Because of its fame, Merian may have asked the Amerindians about this legendary spider specifically.

The picture captures a reality far beyond the crook of one limb. It tells the story of the whole rain forest. Liana vines web the trees together like some vegetable spider. They grow up from the leaf litter, climbing the trunks, draping themselves over branches, gathering bushes, other vines, adjacent trees in their grip. Strangler vines drip down from above, until the whole host tree vanishes into their fist. Trees send out their own emissaries, not just branches but buttress roots, aboveground support systems that flare out in every direction, supporting the tall trunks the way buttresses support the ceilings of cathedrals. Cacti sprout on high tree branches and grow fruits shaped like red flowers. Birds hang on them upside down and pick out the seeds. Plants emerge on top of other plants and frogs live in them. Every form of life casts about for a foothold where it can flourish, and every form of life, from infant spider to the tallest tree sustains someone else, hungrier.

About the author

Kim Todd is the author of Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, published in 2007 by Harcourt. The New Yorker called the book a "spellbinding biography" and Kirkus Reviews lauded it as "a breathtaking example of scholarship and storytelling."

Todd's first book, Tinkering with Eden, won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in Sierra, Orion, and Grist, among other places.