Maria Sibylla Merian

In 1679 and 1683 she published two volumes on European caterpillars, researching, writing and illustrating them herself and etching the plates for the first with her own hand. Each plate shows an insect's egg, caterpillar, pupa and adult arranged around the plant its caterpillar fed on.

Her Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1705) has 60 large plates of insects and other animals of Suriname shown on their food plants. In the preface she says she observed and painted almost everything herself, adding a few items on the testimony of Indigenous informants, and kept the local names of plants alongside Latin names supplied by the botanist Caspar Commelin.

Her surviving study journal, now in St Petersburg, pairs numbered notes with small life-size paintings on vellum. It opens with rearing trials she dated to 1660, when she was thirteen, and has entries as late as 1710. A visitor in 1711 was also shown a thick volume of plants painted from life on parchment.

Many of the caterpillars she reared died or were killed by parasites before reaching adulthood. According to her own accounts, as analysed by the biologist Kay Etheridge, she began again the next season with fresh caterpillars, and completing the full life cycle took her four years for both the dot moth and the cabbage moth, and three years for the emperor moth.

Returning year after year to rearings that had failed is consistent with the high persistence in her profile, though the details come largely from her own records. Persistence

When the collector Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited her in Amsterdam in February 1711, he noted that she had engraved all the plates of her caterpillar books herself. She charged him 45 guilders instead of the usual 15 for a copy of the Suriname book she had coloured by hand. Her letters show that she funded that book by subscription and sold specimens from Suriname to collectors.

Doing her own engraving, colouring and selling offers one example of the resourcefulness her profile reads in how she kept her research self-supporting. Resourcefulness

In Amsterdam she saw collections of tropical insects that showed only adult specimens, with nothing about how they developed. In June 1699, aged 52, she sailed to the Dutch colony of Suriname with her younger daughter, and stayed until June 1701, returning earlier than planned because of the heat. Her book mentions enslaved and Indigenous people who dug up plants for her, cut paths through the forest and told her about plant uses.

Setting out to observe these insects' life cycles for herself, which no one had asked her to do, sits alongside the strong reading of taking the initiative in her profile; the work also depended on the labour and knowledge of people in Suriname. Proactive Agency