Daniel Pauly

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Daniel Pauly : biography

May 2, 1946 –

Daniel Pauly is a French-born marine biologist, well known for his work in studying human impacts on global fisheries. He is a professor and the project leader of the Sea Around Us Project at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia. He also served as Director of the Fisheries Centre from November 2003 to October 2008.

Views

To date, he frequently expresses opinions about public policy. Specifically, he argues that governments should abolish subsidies to fishing fleetsAAAS (2007) and establish marine reserves. He is a member of the Board of Oceana. In a 2009 article written for The New Republic, Pauly compares today’s fisheries to a global Ponzi scheme.

Publications

Select publications

  • Pauly D (2010) Island Press. ISBN 978-1-59726-719-9.
  • Pauly D (2009) The New Republic, September 28.
  • Pauly D, Christensen V, Guénette S, Pitcher TJ, Sumaila UR, Walters CJ, Watson R, Zeller D (2002) Nature, 418: 689-695.
  • Pauly D (1998) "Why squids, though not fish, may be better understood by pretending they are". In: Payne, A.I.L., Lipinkski, M.R., Clarke, M.R. and Roeleveld, M.A.C. (eds.). Cephalopod biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution. South African Journal of Marine Science, 20: 47-58.
  • Pauly D, Christensen V, Dalsgaard J, Froese R and Torres F (1998) Science, 279: 860-863.
  • Pauly D (1998) "Beyond our original horizons: the tropicalization of Beverton and Holt". Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 8(3): 307-334.
  • Pauly D (1995) "Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries". TREE 10(10): 430
  • Pauly D and Christensen V (1995) Nature, 374(6519): 255-257.
  • Pauly D (1981) "The relationships between gill surface area and growth performance in fish: a generalization of von Bertalanffy’s theory of growth". Berichte der Deutschen Wissenchaftlichen Kommission für Meeresforschung, 28(4): 251-282.
  • Pauly D (1981) "On the interrelationships between natural mortality, growth parameters and mean environmental temperature in 175 fish stocks". Journal du Conseil international pour l’Exploration de la Mert, 39(3): 175-192.
  • Pauly D and David N (1981) "ELEFAN I, a BASIC, program for the objective extraction of growth parameters from length-frequency data". Reports on Marine Research, pp. 205–211.

Biography

Pauly was born in Paris, France. He grew up, however, in Switzerland in what was called a strange "Dickensian" childhood where he was forced to stay as a live-in servant to a new family. For the first 16 years of his life, Pauly lived an inward life as he was mixed race in an all white town, finding solace in books/reading and model construction. At 16 he ran away and put himself through high school in Wuppertal, Germany after one year working with disabled people for a local church-run institution. His work led to a scholarship to the University of Kiel.

It was at the University of Kiel where Pauly decided on fisheries biology. He said he wanted to work in the tropics because he felt that he would "fit in" better there. He also wanted to devote his life to an applied job where he could help people.

He did a master’s degree at Kiel University under Gotthilf Hempel on "The ecology and fishery of a small West African lagoon".Pauly, D. 1973. Investigation on the ecology and fishery of a small West African Lagoon. M.Sc. Thesis. In German with an English summary

Pauly then spent two years conducting trawling surveys as a member of a German-Indonesian project aiming at introducing this relatively new gear.Malakoff 2002 He began to write on tropical fisheries management; later his emphasis switched to global fisheries trends and conservation. 

Some of Pauly’s best work arguably appeared in his Ph.D. dissertation at Kiel University in Germany, again under Hempel, in which he established strong relationships between the surface area of gills and the growth of fishes and aquatic (gill-breathing) invertebrates.Pauly, D (1998) In: Payne AIL, Lipinkski MR, Clarke MR and Roeleveld MAC (eds). Cephalopod biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution. South African Journal of marine Science 20: 47-58