Daniel Pauly
"World Fisheries Futures"
Tuesday, April 06, 2004, 12:30 PM
Daniel Pauly, internationally renowned fisheries expert, presented an informative and entertaining lecture entitled "World Fisheries Futures" as part of the 2004 Environment Matters Lecture Series, presented by Illahee. Elected to the Royal Society of Canada, Dr. Pauly is widely regarded as the world’s pre-eminent fisheries scientist.
Iconoclastic and controversial, Dr. Pauly’s research in West Africa and Indonesia alerted the world to the plight of tropical fish stocks. In the late 1980’s, Dr. Pauly launched FishBase, a global database on fish, and more recently has begun The Sea Around Us Project, which evaluates the impact of fishing on marine ecosystems.
Dr. Pauly is currently the Director of the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre, but first became renowned through many years of field-defining work at the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resource Management, then in Manila, Philippines. He developed the "Pauly Equation" which enables researchers in data-poor tropical nations to estimate the natural mortality of fish, a key measure needed to calculate sustainable catches. Dr. Pauly has developed cutting-edge software to assist field scientists, including Ecopath.
Yet, 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.
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. “For better or worse, he’s probably had a greater impact on the field than any member of his generation.”
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.
