Profile

I don’t really have a place I call home. I was born in Portugal but I have lived over half of my life in other countries. As a child, I moved to China with my family for a couple of years before returning to Portugal to finish high school. When I was 17 I moved to North Wales to follow my dream of studying marine biology, and then decided to stay a while longer to do a masters in ecology. Ironically, this decision took me back to Lisbon temporarily to do my masters thesis on freshwater fish. A couple of years later I found myself moving to Gothenburg in Sweden to do a phd on pipefish (cousins to seahorses, it’s the fathers and not the mothers who get pregnant) after which I moved to Switzerland to do a post doc on meerkat behaviour and communication. During my time in Switzerland I also got to spend 18 months in South Africa at the Kalahari Meerkat Project (google it, t’s worth it!). Last month I moved to Bristol to start a new project on conflict and social behaviour in African freshwater fish and I’m very excited about it.

My life and work experience so far really exemplifies what a career in academia entails: we need to move cities and countries to get the experience and the knowledge we need to become better at what we do, and this is also what is expected from us, by universities and funding agencies, until one day we land a permanent position somewhere.

My boyfriend is also a biologist. Although he is Welsh, he lives in Perth, Western Australia… and we met in South Africa 5 years ago. We don’t get to spend as much time together as we’d like to, of course, but we do get to travel a lot together, which we both love. We are both following our professional dreams, while trying to achieve our goal to find a way to live and work in the same city. We’ll get there one day!

In my spare time, I love to go on hikes, do outdoor sports, read, listen to live music, and dive in tropical places.

I’m a behavioural ecologist, which is to say that I study how animals behave in response to ecological pressures (from other animals or the weather, etc) from an evolutionary perspective. Because the species I study clearly still exist, they have mostly successful (adaptive) responses to the environmental pressures they experience, otherwise they would have gone extinct. This is not to say that they behave effortlessly or that they display the best behavior possible all the time. Decisions, behaviours and actions, all have pros and cons, benefits and costs, plus often animals are restricted in their options. For example, I found that my pipefish females prefer to mate with large males because they are better fathers. The babies brooded by large fathers are bigger, they grow faster and they are better at avoiding predators. Great! However, once a male becomes pregnant, he cannot received any more eggs until the ones in his pouch are fully developed and ready to leave. This means that females run out of good quality, especially large males to mate with. What they are left with are the smaller males, which are younger and not as good parents. So what is a female to do? If they do not mate with the small males, autumn make come before they have a chance to find and mate with a large male. If they do mate with a small male, their babies won’t be as good quality as if she had mated with a large male. Well it turns out that mating with a small male is better than not mating at all for pipefish females, BUT, they have a trick up their sleeves. When females mate with small males they add extra protein into the eggs so that their babies have more nutrients to grow and develop, making up for the worse quality of the small fathers.

Throughout my career I have studied parent-offspring conflict, sibling competition, mate competition (when what is best for one sex is not what is best for the other sex, as in my example above), conflict between dominant and subordinate meerkats, and also how hormones affect behavior and communication in animals. For example, when I have to stand up and give a talk, my stress hormones go up as I start feeling very nervous and I my voice trembles a bit. If you’re listening to me, you can hear in my voice that I’m nervous. This is part of what I studied in meerkats, when they are stressed, can other group member “tell” that they are stressed from their vocalisations? And if so, does this knowledge affect their own behavior and vocalisations? It’s been very difficult but at the same time a lot of fun to do these studies and hopefully, my findings will help us understand animal vocalisations better.

In Bristol, I am going to study how out-group conflict affect within-group behaviour. For example, if you’re part of a football or rugby team you probably play matches against other teams on the weekends. Your team is your “within-group”, and the other team is the “out-group”. How do you and your teammates behave towards each other after the games when you win? And when you lose? Is it all the same? Or do behave differently? This is what I will study using a fish species from Lake Tanganyika in Africa, that are very social and live in small groups. But for now, I’m still setting up the room where the fish are going to live.

My typical day is almost seasonal, depending on the time of the year my days may look very different.

When I run experiments, whether in the field or in the lab, may days are usually very long and I spend most of the time with the animals I study, observing them, collecting data, testing them on different things. After the experiments are done it’s time to move to the office and my desk, and at this point I spend my days in front of the computer, compiling data, analyzing it, and writing up the studies into scientific articles.

In the summers, I try to attend at least one conference. Conferences give me the opportunity to travEl and meet lots of other scientists, to present my experiments to others and share my results, as well as to listen to other researchers’ findings. Being a scientist is all about finding new things, and sharing the knowledge, so we don’t end up reinventing the wheel. This is also why it is so important to read other scientists’ work, so that weeks or months later, you don’t find out that the study you spent so much time and effort planning and doing, has already been done. I am also a very curious person by nature, so to “learn for a living” is something that suits me really well. 🙂

Supervising and teaching students are two other very important tasks in our work lives and two that I really enjoy. Some of my best memories as a biologist have been during teaching, like when I spent 2 weeks on an island in Mozambique with 3 other teachers and 15 Ph.D. students, exploring the different habitats around the island and the animals that inhabit them.