Maria Merian drew the insect with its food

Maria Sibylla Merian raised caterpillars and recorded their transformations. In her 1705 book on Suriname insects, a single plate could gather a moth’s stages around the plant on which she observed it feeding. The arrangement was beautiful, but it also carried information: insects were not isolated specimens. Their lives unfolded through time and depended on particular plants.

Merian worked within seventeenth-century collecting and colonial networks, and later taxonomic standards should not be projected backwards onto every identification. Some plates combine observations for composition. Still, her method opposed the lingering idea that insects simply arose from decay. Patient rearing let one living form answer for the next, while the host plant kept ecology in the frame.