Spiders, Ants, and a Hummingbird

The story

Maria Sibylla Merian self-funded a two-year expedition to the Dutch colony of Surinam in 1699, an extraordinary undertaking for any 17th-century naturalist and a genuinely radical one for a woman working without institutional backing, to document the insect life of the South American tropics through direct field observation rather than secondhand report. This plate, from the resulting Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705), shows a pink-toed tarantula looming over a hummingbird carcass while leafcutter ants march up a branch in strict formation — a scene European naturalists dismissed as fantastical exaggeration for over two centuries, since large spiders preying on birds seemed obviously impossible. Field biologists have since confirmed several tropical tarantula species do occasionally take small vertebrates. What to notice: Merian drew every stage of a creature's life cycle in a single composition whenever she could — this plate compresses predation, colony behavior, and web architecture into one continuous scene, decades before ecology existed as a discipline.