The Spider That Was Named After Her

Maria Sibylla Merian kept silkworms in her bedroom at thirteen, watched a moth crack out of its chrysalis, and grew up to overturn the European theory of where insects came from. Two books on caterpillars followed. By her early fifties she was a divorced woman in Amsterdam with two grown daughters and a steady trade in flower paintings.

Then, at fifty-two, she sold 255 of her own paintings, took her twenty-one-year-old daughter Dorothea, and sailed to Suriname.

She stayed nearly two years, painting by candlelight in a malarial jungle, until the malaria sent her home. The result was Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, sixty hand-colored plates. Plate 18 shows a pink-toed tarantula on a guava branch eating a hummingbird, with army ants in the background forming a bridge out of their own bodies.

The European scientific establishment called it fantasy. For one hundred and fifty years. A naturalist who had never set foot in Suriname pronounced her engravings vile and useless, which is the kind of review you cannot buy.

In 1863, in the Amazon, Henry Walter Bates watched a tarantula eat a bird.

The species is now called Avicularia merianae.