Patrícia Vicente

Patrícia Vicente is a Ph.D. Student in Behavioural Biology at ISPA – Instituto Universitário and MARE – ISPA. Her current research interests are marine fish behaviour, marine larvae behaviour, inter and intra-communication of fish, marine conservation, marine biodiversity, marine ecology, marine fish evolution with special focus in fish behaviour and effects of climate change and global changes in fish behaviour. In her Ph.D., she is studying how temperate reef larvae, specifically sand-smelt (Atherina presbyter) and white-seabream (Diplodus sargus), choose habitat for settlement. She is interested in investigate how important sensory cues based on olfact and vision are to guide larvae to the best settlement site possible to maximize fitness of species. Furthermore, she intends to relate behaviour of larvae based in sensory cues given by olfact and vision with state of development of these two organic systems during their ontogeny, from hatching to juvenile. She will be also investigating evidence of cohesive dispersal of larvae of white-seabream (Diplodus sargus) in some temperate reefs of Portugal. In top of that, she will accurate effects of global changes, especially degradation of habitat, in larvae behaviour for choosing adequate settlement sites.
Patrícia Vicente’s past work consisted in her master thesis. She studied variability in growth and condition of juvenile common two-banded sea bream (Diplodus vulgaris). She compared information given by otolith daily increments with commonly used condition indices of fish, Fulton’s K and RNA:DNA ratio, to assess growth and condition of juveniles along main estuaries of Portuguese coast.