CIMAR-LA Seminar With Cláudia Serra & João Saraiva

Fish welfare is an increasingly relevant topic across science, industry, policy, and society. The scientific framework for animal welfare includes five main domains: Nutrition, Environment, Health, Behaviour, and Mental States. 

At CIMAR-LA, all these domains are addressed through leading research activities and multidisciplinary collaboration.

This seminar will focus on the Health and Behaviour domains, presenting the work of two research groups from CIIMAR and CCMAR, and highlighting their latest findings and contributions to European leadership in fish welfare.

Talks

“Development of Oral Vaccines for Aquaculture” by Cláudia Serra (CIIMAR)

Discover innovative strategies in fish disease prevention, focusing on the development of oral vaccines using spore-forming bacteria with high biotechnological potential.

“Fish Welfare: An Ethological Approach” by João Saraiva (CCMAR)

Understand fish welfare through the lens of ethology, exploring behavior-based assessments and their application in aquaculture, wild populations, and fisheries.

Speaker Biographies
 

Cláudia Serra
Dr. Serra specializes in microbiology and biotechnology applied to aquaculture. She completed her PhD at ITQB-NOVA in collaboration with DSM Nutritional Products (Switzerland), and joined CIIMAR in 2013. As coordinator of the MBAqua Research Group and Assistant Professor at the University of Porto, her work focuses on using beneficial bacteria to address disease challenges in fish farming.

João Saraiva
A fish ethologist dedicated to welfare research, Dr. Saraiva teaches Ethology at the University of Algarve and leads the Fish Ethology and Welfare Group at CCMAR. He is also president of the FishEthoGroup Association. His work integrates behavioral science into welfare assessment and improvement strategies for aquatic animals across aquaculture, wild settings, and policy-making.