Metamorphosis, page 2
part one
where do we come from?
1.
SURINAM
It was so hot, she thought she might faint. The previous night, a hole in the netting stretched around her bed had allowed mosquitos to gain access, and they’d kept her up until dawn. She was tired, and covered in bites. But she was preparing for a deeper journey into the jungle.
She’d already learned: Traditional methods didn’t work here, where she could not know whether to look down to avoid tripping on furious tree roots, or look up to avoid a giant boa constrictor falling from the forest canopy onto her head. For over thirty years she’d perfected the method: Find a caterpillar, note and collect its food plant, put it in a box, make sure it was comfortable and feed it, then wait to see what happens. Keep on doing it, time after time, until you discover the pattern of things: which egg turns into which caterpillar, which feasts on which plant before spinning a cocoon or building a chrysalis.i If the pupa produced parasitic flies or wasps, draw them and their cocoons and their larvae. By meticulously following this regimen, she’d gained a name for herself, producing her first publication on insects in 1679, a quarto titled The Wondrous Transformation and Particular Food Plants of Caterpillars, and a sequel four years later. But now she was in a far-off land just above the equator, a land of red peppers and papayas, palm-sized tufts of fluff that “looked like dandelions,” venomous forest pit vipers, fifty-meter trees necklaced with coconuts, rivers full of hungry schools of piranhas. The scale was unimaginable, the vegetation as dense as it was lush, and however much she tried to obstruct them, wood lice would not stop falling down her blouse. Running after a butterfly here, she thought, was nothing like simply holding out a finger near a flower at the botanical gardens back home in Europe. Still, she wasn’t going to sail upriver for naught.
Packed with sugarcane fields on the northeast shoulder of South America, Surinam (known today as Suriname) had been fought over for years, until the English traded it to the Dutch for Manhattan in 1667. One share now belonged to the city of Amsterdam, another to the Dutch West India Company, and a third to Cornelis van Sommelsdijck, who became its first governor in 1683 only to be brutally murdered by his own mutinous garrison five years later. Sir Walter Raleigh had traveled to this “indescribably bewtiful” tropical paradise, as he called it, losing a son there, and following him, so did the politician George Warren. The landscape, the latter wrote, was “high, and mountainous, having plain Fields of a vast Extent, here and there beautified with small Groves, like Islands in a Green Sea; amongst whose still flourishing Trees, ’tis incomparably pleasant to consider the delightful Handy-works of Nature.” There were silver-beaked tanagers in this land, and anteaters and crocodiles, even the much-coveted exotic European rarity, the pineapple. Warren invited brave souls to seize the economic opportunities, along with the scantily clad Amerindian girls. The most daring, like Raleigh, had hoped to find gold in the mythical city of El Dorado. But Maria Sibylla Merian, fifty-two years old, had other plans. She had come to investigate the butterflies.
Maria and her daughter Dorothea arrived in the capital, Paramaribo, in August 1699, settling into one of the five-hundred-odd wooden houses, one with a small garden. This they used to grow plants collected in the forest just beyond the settlement, with its protective fort and cannon. Some they recognized, like the costus, with its bright-red, pinecone-like, fleshy leaves and delicate, tapering, white flowers, others remained unknown; not even the locals, Maria noted, were “able to tell me its name or properties.” There were few amenities in the house, still fewer physical comforts. But as the weeks and months passed, life settled into a tropical rhythm, the sun bouncing off the crushed seashell–paved streets, the patter of rain punctuating early evenings and dawns.
Now, in the spring of 1700, she and Dorothea were about to set out by river ferry, then canoe, to the farthest outpost in the jungle. The tiny colony of La Providence had been built by a community of Labadists, followers of the French-born Protestant religious leader and pietist Jean de Labadie. As it happens, Labadie’s wife had been the sister of the murdered governor, Cornelis van Sommelsdijck. When de Labadie died in 1674, his followers, including three of the governor’s daughters, set up an egalitarian monastic community in the van Sommelsdijcks’ stately home—Waltha Castle—in Wiuwert, Friesland. Maria and her mother and daughters had been part of this community. Although it didn’t last, two of the governor’s daughters decided to establish another Labadist settlement, this time in the New World. Paddling into the farthest reaches of the Surinam rainforest, they hoped to find God in La Providence.
Maria knew Surinam was as cruel as it was beautiful. Over 90 percent of its inhabitants were slaves, and the colonists treated them like dirt. The Amerindian women told her how they’d drink peacock flower seeds to induce abortions after having been raped by white men. In the book that would eventually come, The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, she illustrated the peacock flower and wrote beside it: “Indeed they even kill themselves on account of the usual harsh treatment meted out to them; for they consider that they will be born again with their friends in a free state in their own country, so they told me themselves.” But even Maria could not escape the structural injustice. In an inhumane system, the best she could do was make a modest plea for a modicum of humanity.
Passing leopard-spotted stingrays buried in the muddy river bottom and spectacled caimans patrolling the banks, Maria and Dorothea’s ferry reached Cassipora Creek, where slave-owning Jews, themselves refugees as well as colonists, had built Bracha v’ Shalom (Blessing and Peace), one of the earliest synagogues in the Americas. Next came the Hernandez Plantation, then the Castilho Plantation, then there suddenly it was, La Providence. Maria had been forewarned: Some years earlier a large group of slaves had broken away from here, escaping their brutal treatment by the pietists. Women and children scrambled across the river, heading south, away from the ocean, joining other “maroons” in the jungle depths. There was always a danger the settlement might be attacked, to pillage guns or rescue relatives. Even in Surinam, La Providence had a vicious name.
The reunion with the remaining Labadists—“the satellite of a vanished planet, orbiting around emptiness,” as Merian’s modern biographer Kim Todd put it—must have been awkward. “Did they find the flame of belief hard to keep lit here in the understory,” she asks, “where tests would come in the form of deadly disease rather than a coat with shiny buttons? How many times did they have to shield their Bibles from wood ants? So many of the others had given up and gone back home.” And what did Maria make of this, among members of a group to which she once belonged, sitting down for supper meals undoubtedly punctuated by awkward silence? Having left behind her, besides her published books and work journals, only eighteen rather unrevealing letters, we will never know.
Still, Maria had business to attend to. Already she’d discovered that the wings of the Menelaus blue morpho butterfly—which she described as “polished silver overlaid with the loveliest ultramarine, green and purple.… Its beauty cannot be rendered with the paint-brush”—looked like roof tiles under a magnifying glass. That vine sphinx moth caterpillars ate “voraciously,” and that the legs of the flag-footed bug fell off when she touched them, no matter how carefully. She was observing so closely that she was already able to refute a pronouncement of the great microscope man from Delft, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, on the existence of eyes on the bodies of caterpillars (they didn’t really exist). But her appetite could not be satisfied, and she pushed ever farther into the jungle.
“The forest grew together so closely with thistles and thorns,” she wrote of her excursions beyond La Providence, “I sent slaves with hatches ahead, so that they chopped an opening for me, in order to go through to some extent.” Here, virtually all the plants were unknown to her, and most of the insects were complete novelties. There were ants that made bridges with their bodies, she wrote, and others that “can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night.” Hairy tarantulas sucked blood out of hummingbirds. Giant water bugs devoured frogs, and snakes burrowed through cassavas to lay their eggs inside. There were strangler vines, and buttress roots, and cactus sprouts, and tiny worms and spiders and geckos, all entangled. Doing her best under the circumstances, she sketched each of these in her notebook, always life-size, always depicted within its habitat. Later, safely back home, she’d carefully etch a copperplate engraving, run it through the press to create a partial print, and when that print was still wet, transfer a reverse image unto vellum. Then she’d unfurl her wooden brushes, take out her gum arabic, and begin painting in watercolor by hand.
In La Providence, Maria recorded an enigma that had puzzled her for months. Back in Paramaribo, she and her lady servants were woken up in the middle of the night: A loud chirp echoed in the house. Following the noise to its origin, they found a box, and upon opening it, as Maria records, “a fiery flame came out.” They jumped back in fright. It was the bulging, alligator-like heads of the lanternflies in the box that had lit up, she thought, a sight like no other. But where had the lanternflies come from? It was almost impossible to catch a young lanternfly to chart its metamorphosis; they were silent, cryptic, nocturnal, and rare. But Maria had captured a little immature green beetle, a cicada, whose wings seemed to grow slightly larger with each molt, and who made a sound “like a lyre.” The local women told her that this insect was the “mother” of the lanternfly, but could Maria be sure? In bed, in the hinterland of La Providence, she heard the distant chirp in the darkness, and wondered.
Footnote
i Butterflies build a chrysalis, which is a naked pupa and comes from the Greek word for “gold.” Moths, on the other hand, spin a protective silk enclosure around their pupa, called a cocoon, which is from the Old French word coque, meaning “shell.”
2.
CICADA
There was no way Maria Sibylla Merian could have guessed, but cicadas have nothing to do with lanternflies, and have been chirping away before the dinosaurs arrived, besides. They have continued to chirp through five mass extinctions and five ice ages. Appropriately enough, they happen to be one of the planet’s slowest maturing creatures.
In the famous mariachi song “La Cigarra” (“The Cicada”) by Raymundo Pérez y Soto, cicadas are romanticized as creatures that sing until their death. Another Latin American tune, recorded by Mercedes Sosa, “Como La Cigarra,” hails the cicada as a symbol of defiance, inspiration for eternal survival. The Greeks seemed to have grasped this double nature, already in the times of Homer: In the Hymn to Aphrodite, Eos, the goddess of the dawn, begs Zeus to make her lover immortal. Zeus grants her wish, but she forgets to ask that he also become ageless. The lover grows old and never dies, shriveling and shrinking, until he turns into the world’s first cicada.
Still, the ancient Greeks called them the “love of the muses,” the “sweet prophet of summer,” and likened them to gods. Athenian ladies wore gold cicadas in their hair as ornaments, and they were kept in cages, like pet birds. A toy cicada sitting on a harp was an emblem of the science of music, and while the acerbic Homer compared them to garrulous old men, Antipater preferred the notes of the cicada to the swan’s:
The Muses love thy shrilly tone
Apollo calls thee all his own
’Twas he who gave that voice to thee
’Tis he who tunes thy minstrelsy.i
Cicadas accompanied humans through their joys and sorrows, and many cultures developed unique traditions involving them. In Suriname, as reported two centuries after Merian in the American Naturalist by the medical doctor F. C. Clark, young boys fasten straws to cicadas and run with them through the streets.
Where do cicadas fit in nature’s economy of change? A minority of insects, like silverfish and bristletails (and also earthworms and lice), undergo no metamorphosis at all. They are called ametabolous, and once they hatch from their eggs they sport all their necessary body parts and simply grow larger with every molt. Cicadas, on the other hand, experience something more dramatic. At their final molt, to finally become true adults, they sprout sex organs and true wings that will allow them to take to the skies and find a mate.
There are two major cicada clans: a small offshoot in Australia and Tasmania—including the Australian greengrocer, one of the loudest insects in the world—and all the rest, three thousand species strong, strewn across the planet. Only Antarctica is innocent of this seemingly carefree insect. Today we know that there are fully fifteen species from nine genera, three tribes, and two subfamilies of cicadas living in Suriname; the one Maria ended up painting is known by its Linnean name, Fidicina mannifera. A cicada is a rather unusual-looking creature. Its compound eyes, placed far apart from each other on either side of two small antennae, give it a strangely earnest gaze, like an extraterrestrial’s, or—if you look at it long enough—a vacuous one, like a cow’s.
Cicadas come in all sizes. Some species, like the empress cicada, are huge, with a wingspan of eight inches, others are smaller than a dime. And humans have put them to many uses: to forecast the weather, as medicine, or money; as delicious meals, especially as grubs, deep fried in Shandong cuisine. Their many species are colloquially known by names like black prince, double drummer, and whiskey drinker, which makes sense when you recall that in Hesiod’s Shield they are mentioned as those who sing when the millet ripens. Chirping in a chorus of males up to 100 dB high, a cacophony equivalent to a power lawn mower or garbage truck, cicadas can bring about permanent hearing loss if you get too close for too long.
The surface of their wings are a fortress. Covered by tiny, waxy spikes, they repel water and rip open the membranes of bacteria, making cicada wing surfaces the world’s first-discovered bacteria-killing biomaterial. No less incredible are the rubbery structures that allow for singing: a pair of tymbals straddle the abdomen on each side like a saddle. Rapid alternate flexing and relaxation of the stomach muscles buckles and unbuckles these bells, producing the cicada’s music. Males of some species have almost entirely hollowed out abdomens, which act as sound boxes; others use their tracheae as resonance chambers to amplify their song. Some rub their wings over a series of ridges on their thorax to add a further chorus line. Singing is everything in the world of cicadas. And each species has its own love melody to bring on mating.
What are called annual cicadas appear each season, usually in the late spring or early summer, when temperatures in the shallow soil reach about 64 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s then that their nymphs emerge, having lived for some time at depths down to eight feet in the ground. In annual cicadas, the life cycles of these nymphs vary from two to ten years, but they don’t all mature at once, so only a fraction appear each year. Periodical cicadas are a different story. These species—of which there are seven in North America—gradually develop to full sexual maturity over five molts, reaching the finish line together every thirteen or seventeen years, depending on the species. Then, like an army of synchronized swimmers gone mad, they break through the soil all at once, as many as a million and a half individuals per acre, all of them looking for a branch or trunk on which to molt one final time.
During the previous molts the tiny threads securing the creature’s skin to its outermost layer, or cuticle, detached, and the gap was filled with a gel. Increased cell division created folds in the surface of the skin that allowed it to expand like an accordion. The skin built a new cuticle while the gel absorbed the old one, and as air filled the gap, the insect stepped out of its exoskeleton, a perfect copy of its former self, only larger. A waxy layer then coated its expanding skin all over again, and the new cuticle hardened, like an armor. This was a ritual experienced five times underground, in total darkness.
If you’ve ever neared a tree that hosted cicadas, you’ll have seen the empty husks, called exuviae, littering the trunk, clinging eerily to the bark, like ghosts. Until you really get close to them, you think they’re alive, which explains why the Chinese use the phrase “to shed the golden cicada” when they speak of fooling one’s enemy by using a decoy. Clawing out of them, allowing their new form to harden and darken from its teneral shade of white, the cicadas assume the final stage of their life cycle. In the next three weeks, males will sing, females will click, and sex will be had. Females will proceed to cut slits in the bark of twigs and carefully deposit hundreds of fertilized eggs. And all will then die in great numbers.
The torch has been passed to the next generation. Within four to six weeks, the eggs will hatch, and baby nymphs will drop to the ground, where they’ll burrow into the soil. Feeding on the xylem sap of the roots of the trees where they were conceived, they’ll begin the cycle of slow molts and growth underground. After thirteen or seventeen years, when the temperature of the soil reaches exactly 17 degrees Celsius, they’ll perform their synchronized breakout. Then they’ll sing, have sex, and expire, and the cycle will start again.
Why, as the medical doctor Clark wrote in 1875, does the seventeen-year species “take his leave, and testifies with his lingering life, a glad song which grows feebler and feebler, till finally it dies away sadly but beautiful like the summer he carries with him?” Why the excruciatingly slow maturation, the frenzy of singing and mating, followed by swift death? Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson pondered the question, the latter remarking that the appearance every seventeen years reminded him of great locust years at Monticello. The Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus gave the apt name Magicicada septendecim to a specimen he’d been gifted. But why seventeen? How weird. No one knew the answer.
Today, different theories abound. Periodical cicadas emerge every thirteen or seventeen years, one goes, since no predator exists who could possibly depend on such a diet. Another, to the contrary, speaks of “predator satiation survival strategy”: If massive volumes of cicada emerge all at once, those creatures who feed on them will have their fill, ensuring that the rest of the cicadas survive. Yet a third explanation harnesses mathematics, and the wiliness of prime numbers: emerging every thirteen or seventeen years was an adaptation devised in between ice ages in the Pleistocene, to prevent broods of cicada with different cycles from hybridizing when natural selection was working on them very strongly. Later, the magic of prime numbers would be co-opted to prevent potential predators from receiving periodic cicada protein boosts by synchronizing their own generation cycles to devisors of the cicada’s time of emergence.
