DANIEL PAULY
PROFILE:
Going to the Edge to Protect the
SeaDavid Malakoff
Fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly has carved out a colorful--and
controversial--career with fresh and frank insights into marine
fisheriesDaniel Pauly still remembers his youthful
encounter 30 years ago with what he calls "the living papers." A
graduate student in Germany, Pauly watched the field's royalty with
awe at his first major fisheries conference. "Names I knew only from
the literature were suddenly parading before me like kings," he
recalls. "I was terrified."
These days, the 55-year-old Pauly--tall and graying--is a bit of
a living paper himself. A professor at the University of British
Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, he is arguably the world's most
prolific and widely cited living fisheries scientist, with recent
headline-grabbing papers in Science and Nature.
He's also an architect of a leading fish database and a popular
ecological modeling program.
Despite these accomplishments, Pauly remains something of an
outsider. His offbeat approach to the science is part of the reason.
Whereas colleagues have built careers by using complex mathematics
to crunch massive data sets, Pauly has worked mostly in
data-deprived developing nations, and he says he can't stomach
"enormous equations."
His irreverence is another factor. In a field marked by caution,
Pauly has become an outspoken and often controversial critic of
modern fishing practices. He's suggested that marine fishers will
leave little but jellyfish for future generations to eat, and he has
blamed the Chinese government for inflating fish catch statistics
and helping obscure a global overfishing crisis. The industry, he
says in a sonorous accent that hints at a globe-trotting life, "has
acted like a terrible tenant who trashes their rental." Some
colleagues are also uneasy about his close ties to the Pew
Charitable Trusts--an unabashed advocate for marine conservation
(see sidebar) that has given him nearly $4 million.
But even opponents say Pauly is a valued foe. "[Pauly] is an
immensely charismatic, articulate, big-picture guy in a science that
tends to produce little-picture guys," says veteran fisheries
biologist Ray Hilborn, a friend and sometime critic at the
University of Washington, Seattle. "For better or worse, he's
probably had a greater impact on the field than any member of his
generation."
A difficult start
Pauly
has always stood out from the crowd. The child of a French mother
and an African-American father, he recalls a "difficult" childhood
in Switzerland being raised by another family. A church-related job
working with the disabled led to a scholarship to attend Germany's
University of Kiel, where he chose fisheries science. "I wanted to
find an applied way to help people," he says. He also wanted to
travel. "I sometimes felt odd in Europe, so I thought I might blend
in a little more" in the developing world.
Earning his stripes. Daniel
Pauly displays a professional interest in a Washington, D.C., fish
market.
CREDIT: RICK KOZAK
In 1974, he got his chance, spending 2 years helping aid
officials develop new fisheries in Indonesia. The experience led to
his first big scientific hit: the "Pauly equation." It's a
relatively simple formula that enables researchers in data-poor
tropical nations to estimate the natural mortality of fish, a key
measure needed to calculate sustainable catches. Traditional
methods, he notes, were mostly devised to survey relatively
homogeneous northern fish stocks, not diverse tropical schools, and
depend on reams of technical information churned out by
well-equipped labs.
Bent on finding simpler methods, Pauly mined the literature for
the mortality, growth rates, and habitat temperatures of 175 types
of fish. His goal was to use the well-documented species to predict
the mortality of unstudied varieties living in similar habitats.
Success would allow researchers to use a pocket calculator to crunch
easily gathered numbers, such as fish lengths culled from local
markets.
The mathematical product of Pauly's labors appeared in 1980
[ICES Journal of Marine Science 39 (3),
175-192] and the paper has become the most cited of his more than
400 publications. Its tally of 313 citations, as compiled by the
Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
is 16 times the norm.
The formula has also become a celebrated part of Pauly's
professional persona. When Hilborn wrote a parody a few years ago
comparing fisheries research to a priesthood, he dubbed Pauly "the
Prophet Daniel, ... a heretic" who had been exiled to "the lower
regions, the hot places. Daniel must toil in infernal heat ... armed
only with a thermometer."
Today, researchers still debate the robustness of Pauly's
equation. "It doesn't always give the right answers," says Ransom
Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, "but it got
people thinking about better ways." Pauly is self-deprecating: "The
equation gets lots of citations. But half of them probably say,
'It's crap--but there is nothing else to use.' "
Career move
Armed with
his doctorate, Pauly moved to the Philippines in 1979 for what
became a 15-year stint at the International Center for Living
Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM) in Manila. A training ground
for researchers from developing nations, ICLARM offered Pauly a
bully pulpit as well as backing for two major projects that would
raise his profile.
One was FishBase, a global database now packed with information
on more than 26,000 species of fish (http://www.fishbase.org/). As a
student, Pauly was inspired by Walter Fischer, a biologist with the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), who cajoled
colleagues into assembling fact sheets on thousands of economically
important fin- and shellfish. The personal computer seemed like a
natural extension, and in 1989, FAO and ICLARM joined forces to
create FishBase, with Pauly and Rainer Froese, a German computer
expert, running the show. After several false starts, FishBase now
boasts of more than 3 million hits a month. "It may end up as
[Pauly's] most lasting contribution," says Serge Garcia, a biologist
with FAO in Rome, Italy.
The other high-profile project enhanced an ecosystem-modeling
program called Ecopath. Traditional techniques that treated each
fish stock separately had failed to grasp the messy world of marine
ecosystems, and Pauly saw new possibilities in Ecopath, a
little-known model for estimating biomass changes along coral reefs
that was first developed by Jeffrey Polovina of the U.S. National
Marine Fisheries Service. "I took it and tweaked it," says Pauly,
incorporating an array of information on fish habitats and life
histories that allows researchers to predict how populations might
respond to various pressures. As with FishBase, he also recruited
savvy partners, notably Danish biologist and software wizard Villy
Christensen, and used training workshops to spread the gospel.
Today, Ecopath and its offshoots are widely used. But like
Pauly's equation, it is often reviled as too simplistic. "It's
useful but still a work in progress," believes ecologist Stuart Pimm
of Columbia University in New York City. Dalhousie's Myers agrees
but says Pauly's team "almost single-handedly brought ecosystem
approaches back to life."
In 1994, after a management shakeup at ICLARM, Pauly moved to
Vancouver to become a tenured professor. He arrived in academia just
as collapsing fisheries sent shock waves around the world, and he
quickly adopted a bolder stance toward conservation. The result was
a burst of provocative papers.
Bye-bye biomass.
Pauly's team has documented a sharp decline in North Atlantic table
fish over the last century.
CREDIT: (MAP IMAGING) JONAH SACHS/FREE RANGE
GRAPHICS, (MAP DATA) R. WATSON, V. CHRISTENSEN, D.
PAULY/OCEANA
The first two are already minor classics. In the 16 March 1995
issue of Nature, Pauly and Christensen took aim at the idea
that the sea is so fertile that humans haven't yet fully tapped its
potential as a source of food. Earlier estimates, the pair noted,
suggested that humans exploited fisheries that used just 2% of the
globe's aquatic "primary production," leaving room to enhance
catches. But the real take is at least 8% of primary production, the
pair calculated, and up to 40% in key fishing grounds. Those numbers
suggest that humans already claim a lion's share of the sea's
accessible wealth.
In the second paper, published in the October 1995 issue of
Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Pauly railed against
"shifting baseline syndrome." Young biologists, he wrote, often
failed to become outraged over the collapse of once-teeming fish
stocks because they couldn't quantify--or didn't believe--anecdotes
about immense past catches. As a result, "each generation ...
accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that
occurred at the beginning of their careers," producing
ever-shrinking expectations of what a fishery should look like. "It
was an idea that was floating around at the time, and I just put a
name on it," says Pauly.
Independence day
Such
concerns eventually brought him together with marine conservation
advocates at a fisheries meeting in 1995. "It was my declaration of
independence," he says. "I ceased seeing myself as servicing
government fisheries departments and the industry," he says,
although some colleagues call it "an act of betrayal."
Two years later, Pauly met Josh Reichert, head of Pew's $45
million environmental program. At Reichert's invitation, Pauly
floated a grand global vision, describing how Ecopath-like software,
FishBase, and regional catch statistics could be combined to produce
a portrait of the state of the world's fisheries. Although half a
dozen prominent researchers predicted it would fail, Reichert says,
"we took a chance anyway."
The $4 million investment paid quick returns. A year later,
Pauly's team--many plucked from ICLARM--scored again with a paper
(Science, 6 February 1998, p. 860)
that analyzed world catch data. It argued that fishers had
systematically overfished larger, more valuable predatory fish, such
as cod and groupers, forcing them to shift to less desirable species
lower on the food chain. This "fishing down the food web," Pauly
said, would eventually leave people with a diet of "jellyfish and
plankton soup."
Such hyperbole, and the statistical gyrations of Pauly's team,
drew groans from some colleagues. FAO staff argued that Pauly had
skewed their data to make his case (Science, 20 November
1998, p. 1383).
In response, Pauly's team said that FAO's suggested
corrections--such as accounting for aquaculture--only made the trend
worse.
A similar exchange followed a recent Nature paper (29
November 2001) with UBC colleague Reg Watson that suggested that
China had intentionally inflated its catch statistics to match its
economic targets. The reality, Watson and Pauly found by comparing
the claims with the fish-producing capacity of Chinese waters, was
that China's overblown numbers had masked a slight decline in FAO's
global catch estimates.
Mr. Pauly goes to
Washington. The researcher briefs congressional staff on
fisheries issues.
CREDIT: RICK KOZAK
In a lengthy response (www.fao.org/fi/statist/nature_china/30jan02.asp),
FAO researchers noted--accurately--that they had long ago asked
China to correct the problem. And they decried press suggestions
that they had intentionally fudged data to hide fisheries problems.
"We welcome efforts to improve the accuracy of our data," says
Richard Grainger, FAO's fisheries chief. "That's why we've worked
hard to make it available to researchers such as [Pauly]."
Both papers "put FAO in a very difficult spot," says Andrew
Rosenberg, dean of life sciences at the University of New Hampshire,
Durham, and the former top U.S. fisheries biologist. "Some people
may [already] have known these things. But [Pauly] puts them
together in a way that makes sense."
Pauly's notoriety has generated a flood of speaking invitations
and helped attract a publisher for a long-planned volume called
Darwin's Fishes. The title is a play on Darwin's famous
finches, although Pauly says, "Darwin actually wrote far more about
fish." Being a celebrity is like hanging onto the side of a fast
boat, he remarks: "It's nice to talk to the waves, but it's
dangerous as hell."
Still, Pauly seems incapable of staying away from the edge. In
recent speeches, he's told fisheries biologists that they need to
win over the public--or else. "If fisheries science doesn't
consummate a marriage with conservation," he says, his
discipline--and the oceans--will suffer.
Volume 296, Number 5567, Issue of 19 Apr 2002,
pp. 458-461.
Copyright © 2002 by The American Association for the
Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.
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