In the latest episode of the Explorers Podcast, now in its second collaboration between the Portuguese Chapter of the Explorers Club, Lusitania Network, and The Portugal News, we sat down with the conservation biologist and environmental educator Martina Panisi to talk about the creatures we're taught to fear, and what we lose by looking away from them.

Martina's world is one of rare tiny species in some of the most remote areas of the world. From African islands to Arabian deserts. She works with species so rare that once she had to be led to it by local hunters on the island of São Tomé and Príncipe.

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But beneath the fascinating facts sits something more important. Martina works as what she calls a translator. Bridging the ecological and the social, the animal and the human. Her newest project, Forest Tales, trains women in São Tomé and Príncipe not just in conservation, but in the safety and self-worth that has to come first, before anyone can protect something else.

It is easy to forget, surrounded by concrete and headlines, that we are cohabiting this planet with millions of other ways of being alive. Martina's work is a quiet insistence that every one of them deserves a place at the table. Even though we may have a tendency to be fearful of them: spiders, snails, scorpions and all.

The full episode is available now across the Lusitania Network and The Portugal News platforms.