Sara Piquet Morón
Personal Jorney
Currently, I am a PhD student at CIBIO-InBIO, University of Porto (Portugal) and CEFE (Montpellier, France) investigating the early life conditions in which anti-social behaviors arise and what are the consequences of this for the individual survival and their reproductive outcome.
2025- Field manager in the Sociable Weaver Project in South Africa (PI Rita Covas and Claire Doutrelant), which led me to find the PhD position I have just started.
2023/24 – Field assistant in the Southern Pied Babbler Project at Kalahari Research Centre, South Africa (Prof. Amanda Ridley) to disentangle how heat stress can impair cognitive abilities in this cooperative breeding bird.
2022 – Lab assistant working with African grey parrots at CCRG-Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Tenerife-Loro Parque (supervision Dr Auguste von Bayern) investigating their pro-social behavior towards affiliate versus non-affiliate individuals.
2020 – MSc in Biodiversity Conservation at Universidad Menéndez Pelayo and Spanish Research Council (CSIC).
2018 – Bsc in Environmental Sciences at University of Alcalá de Henares (Spain).
Research Interests
I am eager to understand why animals cooperate, how do they form and maintain their social bonds, who do they choose to help and in which conditions, and basically all the ins and out behind social behaviour. We now know that social species survive better together, they are motivated to help their partners, at least some of them. But we are missing one piece of the puzzle: why in this collaborative societies there are individuals that do not cooperate, and even take advantage of the system? Why the anti-social phenotype keeps appearing in the evolution of social behavior and or why is it maintained in time? In which conditions do they appear? Are aggresive/selfish/non-cooperative individuals well integrated in a cooperative society or isolated from it? Do they obtain any benefit like, do they get to ever reproduce? I intend to answer some of this questions in the following years during my PhD together Rita Covas and Claire Doutrelant in the Sociable Weaver Project.
Email: sara.pq13@gmail.com, sara.moron@cibio.up.pt
Selected Publications
Soravia, C., Ashton, B. J., Piquet-Morón, S., Thornton, A. & Ridley, A. R. (2025). Investigating the relationship between heat-mediated cognitive impairment and antipredator response in a wild bird. Royal Society Open Science, 12: 251260. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251260
Arnau Calatayud Mascarell, F. & Piquet, S. (2022). Spatiotemporal segregation of the sympatric species Cupiennius getazi and C. coccineus (Araneae: Trechaleidae) in Pacuare Nature Reserve, Costa Rica. Revista Ibérica de Aracnología, 41, 9–14.
