A bunch of bananas, the upper fruits ripe yellow and the lower ones still green, hangs above a huge flower bud of deep red bracts with gray-blue undersides, opening on a fringe of pale flowers. A spiny caterpillar with a blue head climbs at left, a dark red pupa lies among the yellow fruit, and a moth with yellow-ringed eyespots on its hind wings flies at upper left. Maria Sibylla Merian drew the plant for plate 12 of Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1705), engraved by P. Sluyter.

She wrote that the banana served in America as apples do in Holland, eaten cooked or raw, light green when unripe and lemon yellow when ripe, and that its blossom has blood-red leaves as thick as leather, covered beneath with a blue dew. She found the caterpillar on the tree, fed it the leaves until it became a pupa on April 21, and saw the moth emerge on May 10. In the text to plate 22 she compares another caterpillar with this one: very different in looks, yet it produces almost the same kind of moth. The Getty notes that by showing caterpillars on the plants they feed on, Merian brought a more ecological approach to the study of metamorphosis.

It is in the Smithsonian Libraries in Washington, DC.