A pineapple in flower rises from a fan of long, spiny gray-green leaves. Its scaly fruit is tinged blue and pink under a small leafy crown, and bright red bracts spotted with yellow curl out beneath it. Cockroaches fly and crawl over the plant, from a large winged adult at the top to smaller ones on the leaves, and a round tan ball sits on the stalk. Maria Sibylla Merian opened her Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1705) with this plate because she thought the pineapple the finest of all edible fruits; the next plate shows it ripe.

She wrote that cockroaches, the best-known insects in America for spoiling the colonists' linen, food and drink, love the pineapple for its sweetness. The plate is signed by its engraver, J. Mulder. Merian had sailed to Suriname in 1699, aged 52, with her daughter Dorothea and returned in 1701.

The book, more than half a meter tall, held 60 hand-colored engravings, and buyers could choose a Dutch or Latin text. It is in the Smithsonian Libraries in Washington, DC.