Last week I was looking something up at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. It is a treasure trove for scientists, artists, and really anyone interested in natural history, with hundreds of thousands of manuscripts available to peruse for free. It is a worldwide consortium, seated at the Smithsonian in D.C., with universities and national libraries collaborating to make their collections accessible to all.

What was supposed to be a relatively quick search for quasi-abstract images I wanted to learn from for a new project, turned out be a day of my life when I chanced on the biography of a most impressive naturalist that I simply HAD to read. Here is how I fell into the rabbit hole:

I had come to look at the Naturalist’s Miscellany (1789) by George Shaw, which has images of natural objects drawn from life, with Latin and English text explaining what people knew about them then. (Today’s images that are not mushrooms, are from this book.) Many of the engravings found here are spectacular. (In fact, on really bad days, going to this site and just looking at pictures instead of doomscrolling has been my rescue more than once.) After downloading what I thought were the most interesting prints, I decided to browse a bit for mushrooms, since the last blog had all these photographs I had taken of fungi. This is what popped up.

I had come upon a treatise called Brasilische Pilzblumen, (Brazilian Mushroomflowers) written in 1895 by a mycologist named Alfred Möller for a book Botanical Notes from the Tropics. He spent almost three years in Brazil, visiting his uncle who had emigrated from Germany decades earlier. Möller’s contribution to science was a detailed exploration of leaf cutter ants and their symbiotic relationship with certain fungi, which they literally farm, while living inside of them. The fungal agriculture involves planting, cultivating, and harvesting Basidiomycota for food by the ants. (Attina).

He took the photographs in 1890!

They add nutrients from fresh plant material, remove dead tissue and shelter them from predators, while consuming parts of the fungi as food, exclusively, and using fibers from the fungi to reinforce their nests. Ants contribute to protecting the plant against herbivores, fungal pathogens and competing plants. As the fungi thrive, so do the ants. Before we remain too much in awe of this mutualism, however, let’s note that the defoliating leaf cutter ants inflict widespread forest and agricultural damage in tropical regions due to their abundance. Nowadays, countries use satellite imagery and drones to detect their presence in tropical forests to fight decimated their numbers before they irreparably harm the trees.

Möller, it turns out, eventually got around to writing the biography of this uncle he visited, Fritz Müller (1822 – 1897), and this is where it gets fascinating. Well, for me, anyhow, since this was someone radically true to his beliefs no matter the cost, interested in everything under the sun, and never giving up, no matter how burdened by unimaginable losses. (The full text of the biography (1905) in German can be read here. An American retelling based on the biography is available here.)

Here is the short version. Johann Friedrich Theodor Müller is born into a rectory in Germany, one of many siblings, who develops a talent for science and mathematics and goes to university to become a pharmacist, eventually studying medicine. By the time he is done with his studies, he has joined the revolutionary youths of those years around 1848, and has become a fervent atheist, cutting him off from his religious parents and most of his siblings, as well as a woman he intended to marry. Atheism prevents him from swearing an oath to receive his university diploma, making employment difficult, so he decides to travel to Brazil where a German colony is built near Santa Catarina. He lives with the daughter of a poor farmhand and their first child dies at age three. The second child is one of two (out of 12 infants) who survive the ocean crossing to Brazil threatened by rampant malnutrition and diseases. Another thirteen children die of the measles on this trip as well.

In Brazil, the young family builds a hut in the jungle, loses almost everything to floods, to poisonous snakes, to attacks by pumas and indigenous tribes who the Germans have colonially displaced, with disease taking the lives of several of his 10 children. His most beloved daughter later commits suicide during a visit in Germany as a young adult. Müller relentlessly provides for his family with physical labor, income as a doctor with no access to necessary medicines, and eventual teaching gigs that are at the mercy of the Jesuits and the Brazilian government that is reported to have shafted him multiple times.

All the while he observes, records, analyzes and describes everything under the sun – mollusks and seashells, orchids, butterflies, you name it. He publishes, he corresponds, he reads the scientific literature when his means allow him to order the journals, and he draws exquisite images of what he finds in nature. Soon he gets a reputation in Europe, receives honorary doctorates, and begins a life long correspondence with Darwin, who calls him the “prince of observers” using many of Müller’s suggestions and reports to bolster his arguments about evolutionary processes. In fact, Darwin feels so indebted to him that he offers a substantial sum of money when once again natural disaster has destroyed much of Müller’s household and small library, which the latter politely refuses. He does accept, however, the scientific community’s gift of sending journal and literature for free after the disastrous flood.

In 1878 he publishes his observations on the evolutionary advantage of certain colorations in butterflies: mimicry as a defense mechanism against predators. “Müllerian mimicry is a natural phenomenon in which two or more well-defended species, often foul-tasting and sharing common predators, have come to mimic each other’s honest warning signals, to their mutual benefit.” Not only did he observe the functional advantages of coloration, but he developed one of the first ever mathematical models of frequency-dependent selection in biology. (Ref.) Darwinists ran with it.

So why do I go on about this, other than being happy to share something fascinating? I think it is a good reminder that openness to new ideas can produce amazing results. Ok, we probably all agree on that. But Müller also modeled resistance: his passion for something, the natural world in his case, and his engaging with the puzzle of evolution, enabled him to survive the worst hardships and personal losses someone can face. His correspondence reveals over and over again how the drive to understand the world we live in superseded the grief over what this world had in store for him.

It helps me to get a grip on those bad days where I feel overwhelmed. Pick and engage the things that interest you most, and for a while there will be no room for worry. Or rage. Or fear. Even if it is just a temporary relief, it might produce something that goes beyond just the personal realm, even for the many of us who are not the kind of genius he clearly was. Read an obscure biography! Feel better in no time.

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After writing this yesterday, this morning I received an essay by Brian Klaas from my subscription list. It picks up on the topic of resilience, resonating with one’s environment (and even ant colonies,) late in the piece, which is generally about the dangers of optimization in contemporary cultures. The perfect long read , spelling out the dynamics of adaptation and the inherent risks. I would have liked though, if the author had discussed how it cannot be the duty of individuals caught in organizations that profit off optimization, to change from the bottom up – it would harm their livelihoods and functioning within the work place. It has to come from the top down, or as a synchronized movement by many like-minded people. But the essay provides a LOT of food for thought for young people trying to balance life and careers.

Music from Brazil. If you want a full album by Pauletti, I recommend (on Spotify) Ritual das Cordas.