A lot of people are scared of spiders (蜘蛛) and consider their webs to be dirt. But, growing up in Argentina and Italy, I remember seeing webs in the corners of my house and thinking they were gorgeous. Today I create works of art using these beautiful structures.

In my studio, I have a collection of spider webs and hundreds of different spiders. I spend a lot of time experimenting with them. I put a spider in a box and observe how it goes about constructing its web. I sometimes turn the box on its side to see how the spider reacts. Sometimes I put another spider in the box to see how it works with the structure the last one left in place. It may ignore that web and start again from scratch (从头开始) or begin adding to it.

I worked on digitizing webs. Though I see myself as an artist, I actually trained as an architect and the idea is to compare the properties of spiders’ webs with architectural structures to see if there are any similarities.

Of the thousands of species around the world, the one that interests me the most is the Stegodyphus dumicola. In groups, they make thousands of single threads (线), which are then entangled (缠) into a giant web that can lift the spiders straight up and transport them away. It is known as “ballooning”. During the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, for example, I exhibited the vast “aerocene” globes based on it. They aren’t sculptures but rather air-filled bubbles (气泡) that might one day float around the world, powered only by wind and the heat of the sun. I use them to challenge popular ideas about energy use and transportation.

My ambition is to take my work with spiders to the International Space Station, to conduct live experiments to see how they might behave and how they would build webs in a new environment without gravity. I am speaking to NASA about it. I hope to turn them into spidernauts.

Many animals and plants are endangered in the world today. These endangered species are threatened with becoming extinct, meaning they will no longer exist on Earth. Examples include the Cuban Macaw and the Sri Lankan Legume Tree. Hunting, and collecting of the Macaw bird for pets, led to its extinction. While the main reason the native Sri Lankan Legume Tree went extinct was due to habitat loss from development in the 20th century. The main cause for animals and plants disappearing is often a disruption to the food chain due to hunting, habitat loss or even the introduction of invasive (入侵的) species.

Every living thing from one-celled animals to a blue whale needs to eat. Nature is connected and controlled by many fragile food chains. A food chain describes who eats whom in a habitat. When one of the links in a food chain is no longer present — for example, a species goes extinct — the food chain breaks and sometimes this can cause other animals to disappear and the whole system can become imbalanced or even collapsed.

Humans can have disastrous effects on food chains. When people first explored the world, they took animal and plant species from their home countries to the places they explored and settled in. They did not realise the results of introducing invasive species. By doing so, they were disrupting the natural food chains of the areas they explored.

Nowadays there are strict rules controlling the movement of animals and plants between countries. But some parts of the world are still experiencing problems with invasive species introduced hundreds of years ago.

With rising awareness of how we affect the natural environment, hopefully we can learn to protect these food chains and help them to thrive. Otherwise the continued loss of species will eventually mean our own extinction.

Habitat loss, pesticides (农药) and climate change are threatening insect populations worldwide. In 2019, Biological Conservation reported that 40% of all insects species are declining (减少) globally and that a third of them are endangered.

And while it may sound nice to live in a world with fewer bad insects, environmental writer Oliver Milman says that human beings would be in big trouble without insects. That’s because insects play important roles in pollinating (给……授粉) plants we eat, breaking down waste in forest soil and forming the base of a food chain that other larger animals including—humans—rely upon.

“It would be an extremely terrible place to live in—and certainly not something we should ever aim for.” Milman says of an insect free existence. “You would certainly have mass starvation and social unrest... It’d be a place where there would be smelly waste and dead bodies everywhere because insects that break down those materials would be gone.”

Milman charts the troubling decline of insects in his new book, The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World. He says that while it’s impossible to know exactly what’s happening with every insect species in the world, the overall trends are not good: The butterfly population in North America has declined quickly in the past 40 years, for example, and a U. N. assessment done in 2019 found that half a million insect species are under threat of extinction, some in the coming decades.

“The world, our surroundings, would be far quieter, far duller without insects.” he says. “When you start kind of digging down into these figures looking at the research, it’s clear that there’s something seriously wrong... There is a straight decline in most insect populations, and that spells major trouble for them but also for us.”