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Daniel Pauly is arguably the world's most prolific and widely-cited living fisheries scientist. He has been described as iconoclastic, irreverent, and a global thinker.

He is an outspoken and often controversial critic of modern fishing practices and the fishing industry, which he says “has acted like a terrible tenant who trashes their rental.”  

In his latest book, Five Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosystems, Pauly documents how a scientific consensus can emerge from discussions both within and outside the scientific community. Using articles he co-authored that were originally published between 1995 and 2003 in the journals Nature and Science, Pauly illustrates how the initially-contested view that the fisheries crisis is global in nature eventually became accepted by the mainstream scientific community and the public.

In the New York Times, Pauly was quoted as saying: "In some places in the world you can see people chasing the last fish. I the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen."

According to Pauly, fish stocks are plummeting everywhere and if this trend isn't reversed there will be little left to harvest besides what he calls "bait and worse,"—the lowest levels of the marine food web such as sea cucumbers, jellyfish, and even plankton. The only solution, says Pauly, is a massive reduction in global fishing with the creation of large "no fishing" zones where fish are allowed to replenish—a radical shift that he says will only take place if the public demands it.

Pauly's global perspective started early in life. He was born in France to a French mother and African-American father but lived a difficult childhood and youth in Switzerland, where he was raised by another family who treated him much like a servant. At the age of 16, he ran away to Germany and put himself through high school. A church-related job working with the disabled led to a scholarship to attend the University of Kiel, where he chose to specialize in fisheries science.

From there Pauly went on to spend 2 years working with aid officials to develop new fisheries in Indonesia. Once in tropical waters, he realized that methods used to analyze fish in temperate waters did not apply. He also felt strongly that researchers in developing countries are the best ones to study their own fisheries, and that the tools must be affordable. This experience led to what's referred to as the "Pauly equation"—a simple formula used to measure the natural mortality of tropical fishes, key information required to calculate sustainable catches.

Pauly went on to spend the next 15 years at the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management in the Philippines. It was here that Pauly received the backing for two major projects that would raise his international profile. One was FishBase, a global database with information on more than 26,000 species of fish. The other is the now widely-used marine ecosystem-modeling program called Ecopath, which incorporates an array of information on fish habitats and life histories and allows researchers to predict how populations might react to various pressures.

In 1994 Pauly moved to Vancouver where he became a professor in the Fisheries Centre and Zoology Department at the University of British Columbia and the principal investigator for the Sea Around Us Project. Between 2003 and 2008, he was Director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre.

Pauly is also the originator of the phrase "shifting baseline syndrome," which described how young biologists often did not become outraged over the collapse of fish stocks because they either couldn't quantify or didn't believe the historical accounts of immense past catches. Pauly says "each generation...accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers." But ignoring the historical accounts of abundance leads to a very limited expectation of what a fishery should look like, he says.

 
Books
  • Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosystems, Island Press, 2010
  • Gasping Fish and Panting Squids: Oxygen, Temperature and the Growth of Water-Breathing Animals, Excellence in Ecology (22), International Ecology Institute, 2010/
  • Darwin's Fishes: An Encyclopedia of Ichthyology, Ecology and Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 2004

 

Awards (Partial list)

 
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