OCTOBER 24, 1978: NASA launched the Nimbus 7 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The last of the Nimbus satellites, the first of which went into space in 1964, this 1,834-pound baby carried a number of sensors designed to observe terrestrial surfaces. Among them was a radiometer that, for the first time, measured the light reflected off the oceans. The more phytoplankton there are in the surface waters, the more they tend toward a blue-green color; these eyes in space could therefore map the productivity of the world’s oceans. To make them easier to read, the blue-green shades Nimbus 7 measured were converted into a rainbow of colors ranging from blue to red.
The results were fascinating, and a copy of that sparkling plani-sphere soon found its way onto the wall of my childhood bedroom. Over the years, I learned that certain parts of the ocean are more productive than others. In particular, bright-red patches can be seen all along the coast of western and southern Africa, and from California to Peru, where one would have expected to find a blue desert like in the center of the Mediterranean. These unusual areas are “upwelling zones” where cold, nutrient-rich water rises to the surface. Drawn from ocean depths of two hundred to three hundred meters (650–980 feet), these sea-mineral cocktails boost the productivity of the photosynthetic microalgae that feeds the zooplankton, which then fatten up the small pelagic fish and the creatures that eat them, including carnivorous fish, birds, and marine mammals. Upwelling zones only make up about 5 percent of the ocean’s surface, but they produce 25 percent of the fish caught by people.
The upwelling phenomenon is a fascinating one. My oceanography manuals explained it as follows: Imagine an intercontinental missile launched from the equator in the direction of the North Pole. During its flight, the Earth continues to turn on its axis, toward the right. The actual trajectory of the missile relative to the ground will not, therefore, go straight toward the north, but slightly northeast. This deflection phenomenon is called the Coriolis force, and it affects the trajectory of all moving objects that are not firmly attached to the Earth, pushing them toward the right in the northern hemisphere and toward the left in the southern hemisphere. Masses of air and water are also subject to the Coriolis force, which affects oceanic currents. In certain areas where winds push currents along the continents, these giant masses of water are forced away from the coast, which causes more water to be sucked up from the depths toward the surface.
Everything is bigger and richer in these upwelling zones. Even on the foreshore, the shellfish are gigantic—the limpets grow as big as my thumb, the abalone as big as my hand. In southern Africa, these abundant marine resources have fed humans for the last 100,000 years, as mounds of semi-fossilized shells and fish, bird, and whale bones left by the Khoisan people attest. Some believe that our amazing cerebral capacities may even be the result of copious early seafood consumption. Upwelling zones are therefore the cradle of humanity and have long nourished Indigenous peoples. They were also quickly spotted by European navigators, who used them to resupply. Some explorers, including Alexander von Humboldt in Peru, reported that clouds of ocean birds fed on sardines and anchoveta in these zones, leaving behind enormous amounts of guano, which is an excellent fertilizer. This led to a guano gold rush in the nineteenth century and the eventual exhaustion of the resource, which was replaced by synthetic fertilizers in the twentieth century. After that, it was mainly the unfathomable fish stocks in upwelling zones that became the object of industrial exploitation. Things happened quickly: in only two decades, the Americans cleaned out the schools of small pelagic fish in the upwelling off the California coast. The fishery collapsed a few years after John Steinbeck published his famous novel Cannery Row, in 1945.
In the early 1950s, certain California fish meal plants were taken apart, shipped to Peru, and rebuilt there without the knowledge of the local authorities. “If you can import whole plants and run them, despite the fact that they stink to high heaven, in secret, it means there is something seriously wrong,” notes Daniel. Up to then, Peru had planned its use of marine resources around guano production: the seabirds that produced the natural fertilizer—around twenty million cormorants, boobies, pelicans, and penguins—were entirely protected, as was their food source, the anchoveta. Currently, however, it is the anchoveta themselves that have become Peru’s main export in the form of fish meal used to feed pigs and chickens, and in aquaculture all over the world. The use of fresh anchoveta as a food source for Peruvians, many of whom are malnourished, is not considered a serious possibility, despite the fact that it is technically and culinarily possible.
Once fish meal plants moved into the Peruvian industrial landscape, a fisheries institute was founded: IMARPE, or Instituto del Mar del Perú. The institute is every bit as gigantic as the resources it studies. Since its creation, it has employed thousands of people, and today has a staff of seven hundred, even if many of those jobs are temporary. IMARPE’s three research vessels are at sea three hundred days per year. Alongside associated land-based research stations, those ships gather every piece of accessible data on the marine environment, the fish, and their predators—day after day, year after year. A very Soviet-looking photograph shows this army of researchers in 2014, on the institute’s fiftieth birthday: the lab techs are in white coats, the rest in dark suits. Most of them are men, but two women stand among the nine directors in the front row. For Arnaud Bertrand of the French IRD, who spent six years working with the Peruvians in Callao: “It’s hard to do any better: it’s obviously the most studied marine ecosystem in the world.”
The oceanographic mechanisms of coastal Peru are all the more fascinating because, from time to time, they stall. The Indigenous peoples of South America were familiar with the phenomenon, which their Christian descendants baptized “El Niño” after the baby Jesus. In fact, the whole thing starts around Christmas: the trade winds that cause the Humboldt Current and the Peruvian upwelling system weaken, and tropical waters from the northwest take their place. These warm, nutrient-poor waters close like a lid over the coastal areas of Peru, stopping the normally abundant plankton production. This very thing happened in 1972–73, and anchoveta catches, which had been exceeding sixteen million metric tons per year (25 percent of the world catch at the time) collapsed to two million metric tons per year. Some marine animals managed to flee south, but many died on the spot, including thousands of seabirds and marine mammals who were totally dependent on the anchoveta. Beyond the tropicalization of the surface waters off Peru and a drastic reduction in marine life, El Niño is also associated with heavy rains in Peru’s normally arid coastal areas and many climatic irregularities (droughts, flooding, storms) in other parts of the world. This global phenomenon, also called ENSO, for El Niño–Southern Oscillation, has been a source of fascination for oceanographers for decades, especially since it seems to be increasing in frequency and intensity with the planet’s temperature rising as a result of human activity.
Researchers in the field of evolutionary ecology dream of working in the Galápagos Islands, but for oceanographers, there is only one mecca: the Humboldt Current and the Peruvian upwelling system that is subject to El Niño. The crème de la crème of marine scientists tends to flock to Callao, and fisheries biologists are no exception. “Big names like John Gulland, Bill Ricker, John Walsh, Garth Murphy, and other Americans used Peruvian data and published their papers in prestigious reviews without including the local researchers,” Daniel explains. It was Petz Arntz, for whom he had invented the mud-sorting machine years earlier, who opened IMARPE’s doors for Daniel. Petz was running a development program financed by Germany, focusing on Chile and Peru. Since Kiel, he had kept an eye on Daniel’s career. “Petz had scoffed at my thesis on oxygen,” Daniel remembers, “but he recognized the utility of ELEFAN right away.”
As a result, Daniel was invited to come for a few weeks at the end of 1981 to teach, but also to evaluate the potential of the available information on the growth of small pelagic Peruvian fish. “IMARPE was housed in a huge building, and out front, there was a collection of rusty old cars, vehicles donated by various development programs over the years; it was like a museum of automobile history from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. The director of the institute changed every time there was a political crisis, and IMARPE was actually run by four very distinguished women, one of whom was Isabel Tsukayama.” This Peruvian woman of Japanese heritage had been working on fisheries for the last twenty years. She ruled her team with an iron fist and her previous experiences with gringos had not always been positive ones. “I found her charming and I think the feeling was mutual,” Daniel explains seriously. “Isabel gave me whole stacks of documents containing length frequency data, which I took back to Manila with me.” At ICLARM, it was Deng Palomares’s job to feed the data through ELEFAN in order to determine seasonal growth fluctuations and the biomass of Peruvian anchoveta from 1961 to 1979.
“The data was extraordinary, with very clear growth patterns,” Daniel remembers, digging up the article on the subject and showing me the graphics proudly. One of the biggest advances made by that analysis was to put forward not one but twelve annual estimations of anchoveta biomass, which would make it possible to test the impact of environmental variability on the population. “I went back to Peru with a finished article and offered to make Isabel the first author. She turned it down, but she was touched.” After months of transpacific correspondence between Callao and Manila, Deng finally met her Peruvian colleague: “It was strange to meet another Asian Spanish speaker on the other side of the world. Isabel was even shorter than I am, pretty, an elegant forty-year-old, very smartly dressed. There was a real intellectual compatibility between her and Daniel even though she was very conventional and he was a lot more rock and roll.”
After this promising start, Daniel suggested to Isabel that they coedit a book dedicated to the ecology of anchoveta in the Peruvian upwelling system over three decades, starting in the 1950s. She accepted and convinced her colleagues at IMARPE to get on board and collaborate with Pauly’s team at ICLARM. A long series of Peruvian expeditions followed, and Daniel set himself to learning Spanish: “I speak it fluently, but I make tons of mistakes. It’s not pretty, but it’s intelligible.” The book, mostly financed by Petz Arntz’s program, had two main goals: “IMARPE didn’t have a procedure in place to make those huge mountains of data available,” Daniel notes. He therefore offered to include all of it in the volume, which would include dozens and dozens of tables crammed full of figures with everything from wind speed to the volume of anchoveta caught, and even the number of nesting cormorants on the guano islands, month by month, over a period of thirty years.
In the pre-internet era, making this much scientific information available was very unusual. But it was part of Daniel’s philosophy, as he explained in the introduction to his first Peruvian book and again a few years later in another short chapter.1 For him, any analysis of ecological processes must include a historical dimension. It is therefore essential to compile data over as long a period as possible in order to avoid what he calls “reproducibility erosion.” From his studies in Kiel, Daniel also knew that physical oceanographers had been exchanging scientific data freely for over a century, a practice that greatly benefited their discipline. He wagered everything on the application of this precept within fisheries biology. Scientifically, one of the objectives of this huge analysis centered on the Peruvian anchoveta was to test Reuben Lasker’s hypothesis,2 according to which storm activity determines the proportion of anchoveta larvae that survive and eventually reach adulthood. Lasker suggested that the storms cause a strong disruption in the surface waters, where the plankton that feed the fish grow. A washing-machine-like effect then shakes up both predator and prey, which can only find each other during periods of relative calm.
When he arrived in Lima for one of their sessions, Daniel didn’t set foot in a hotel. He preferred to stay “with family” at Claudia Wosnitza and Jaime Mendo’s house. Claudia is one of Daniel’s old classmates from Germany, who went to Peru for her thesis in the 1970s. Her husband, Jaime, also a marine biologist, comes from a village on the Peruvian coast where the landscape resembles the lunar surface. He had met Daniel in Kiel during his master’s degree in 1979. “The weeks with Daniel were wonderful, but also tiring for Claudia and me,” Jaime remembers. “He would get off the airplane with a new manuscript written in pencil on little pieces of paper, and the only non-scientific part of our conversations was ‘hello.’” Jaime was sent on a data-mining expedition in his colleagues’ offices at IMARPE to search for any and all historical information on anchoveta and their environment, with a secondary diplomatic mission of convincing the data’s owners to participate in Pauly and Tsukayama’s big synthesis. “I spent months digging up sheets of information, half-eaten by insects and mice, from the backs of cabinets, and inputting the data. But it was worth it—in the end, we got a complete, 360-degree view of the anchoveta’s little world over three decades; it was unprecedented.”
This first volume devoted to Peru kept Daniel busy until 1986. He supervised all the analyses, encouraged his Peruvian colleagues and coauthors, and edited most of their writing, besides writing the introduction and conclusion to the 351-page volume himself. The scientific message was clear: since the collapse of the anchoveta stocks in 1972–73, birds and marine animals were no longer the main consumers of anchoveta—they had been replaced by carnivorous fish and human fishers. “It is not the sea mammals which threaten the Peruvian pelagic fisheries, but rather the converse,” Daniel concludes.3
He began preparing for the next phase by noting that the first volume did not take socioeconomic factors sufficiently into account, and that it should be considered as simply a first step “toward an integration of what is now known on the dynamics of the fishes off Peru into a large-scale simulation model that could be used to help formulate a comprehensive fishery management plan for that system.”4 This sketch would be the starting point for the second volume, coedited by Daniel Pauly, Peter Muck, Jaime Mendo, and Isabel Tsukayama.5 This new 438-page ode to Peru’s marine environment went much further in its ecological conclusions. In particular, Daniel and Deng wrote a chapter on fluctuations in the anchoveta population: “The recruitment collapse of 1971 appears to have occurred before the onset of the 1972–1973 El Niño event . . . [this] implies that El Niño . . . cannot have been the cause of the collapse of the fishery.” In an excellent synthesis at the end of the volume, Peter Muck describes an ecosystem that has been profoundly transformed since the early 1970s, with warmer surface temperatures reducing the productivity of coastal waters and favoring species that compete with the anchoveta, whose populations had had a hard time recovering. According to Muck, it was mainly the fisheries that prevented the anchoveta stock from regenerating: “The Peruvian fishing industry has now at its disposal only half of the reserves it [had] 30 years ago, when the Peruvian population was half its present size.” He argues for the need to better take into account natural fluctuations in anchoveta stocks and for the use of fresh fish as a food source by local populations, rather than as fodder for fish meal destined for export.
The two volumes became landmarks. According to Arnaud Bertrand of the IRD, they are still “the reference.” “These books are still in all the IMARPE offices today,” he confirms. Bertrand believes that Peru responded to the findings in the correct fashion: quotas were put in place that allowed the stocks to regenerate; indeed, the volume of the catch reached ten million metric tons annually in the 1990s, the same levels as in the 1960s. “Once the quota was set, the fishing fleet started being tracked from day to day. The scientific director of IMARPE is in direct contact with the vice minister of fisheries, and if there is the slightest problem, the fishery is closed the very next day. When it comes to industrial fishing, it’s hard to think of a more adaptive management scheme. Of course, there are always problems with reporting, undeclared landings, and artisanal fishing isn’t tracked.”
Jaime Mendo, whose thesis Daniel directed and who has since become a professor at the National Agrarian University–La Molina in Peru, is more critical: “Even today, we’re still trying to use environmental variability, and specifically El Niño or other large-scale climatic perturbations, to explain fluctuations in anchoveta stocks. The impact of fishing isn’t taken sufficiently into account. Specifically, too many young anchoveta are being caught, then thrown back into the sea to make room for larger fish in the holds of the boats, so we lose billions of dollars and future breeders.” In fact, whereas overfishing was clearly mentioned in the two volumes edited by Pauly and his colleagues in the 1980s, this terminology was absent in the special volume that Arnaud Bertrand and his colleagues devoted to the Peruvian upwelling system in 2008.6 Only Pierre Fréon of the IRD brought up the fact that the anchoveta fishing fleet was too big compared to the state of the resource it exploits, and that, despite the regulations in place, the stocks were, practically speaking, accessible to anyone. He also reminded his readers that, for the period from 1999 to 2005, only 6 percent of the fishery’s catch had been used to feed local populations (of which 40 percent live in poverty), and that the Peruvian government’s neoliberal policies had facilitated the overcapacity of its fishing fleet, leading to a ticking time bomb for the fishing sector. Indeed, as Fréon wrote, “A reduction of the fishing and processing capacity and measures to decrease the investment lag are recommended, to limit the social, economic and political tensions that will result from the expected decrease in stock abundance.” 7
Patricia Majluf confirms this and goes further still. I decided to interview this cosmopolitan Peruvian because she has known Daniel since he began working in Lima: “In 1983, I had just started my thesis on sea lions in conjunction with Cambridge University, and I met Daniel in Petz Arntz’s office at IMARPE. He literally popped out from behind a pile of books and asked, ‘Who are you?’ We started having lunch together, and I would tell him about behavioral ecology and he would tell me about his mathematical models for fish. He always had several projects going at once, collecting data from everywhere, so I called him El Pulpo [The Octopus]. At the time, Peru was going through a large El Niño event. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the stocks came back, and in 2006, the public officials very judiciously decided that they needed to always leave five million metric tons of free ancho-veta in the system. It was an excellent decision from an ecological perspective, but also economically because the prices went up—everyone was happy. But what can you do? People are too greedy, and they’ll do anything to circumvent the rules. On the one side, IMARPE pieces together data to make it look like the five million metric tons are still there, and on the other side, catches are underreported. The whole chain of command is corrupt; fraud has become part of the system.”
Patricia, who currently runs the Peruvian branch of the NGO Oceana, forged an alliance with Daniel and a few others to promote eating anchoveta, “the most nutritious fish in the world.” This was a big challenge because, as she puts it, “All the infrastructure was built around producing fish meal for export. But in 2006, we managed to save 130,000 metric tons for human consumption.” The road is still long, though, and Peruvian legislation does not favor better management of the anchoveta stocks. “The word ‘overfishing’ isn’t in the lawbooks,” Patricia tells me. “The three official stages of a fishery are: underexploited, fully exploited, and reconstituted, meaning that a ‘reconstituted’ stock necessarily comes after a drop due to natural environmental cycles, not overfishing!”
The debate around the management of Peruvian fisheries remained intense, and it was a problem to which Daniel would return. Jaime Mendo recalls, “Daniel was invited to Lima for a conference in 2006. He was excited to see everybody, and, at Patricia Majluf’s suggestion, we decided to jump in and produce a third book on the Peruvian upwelling system.” They chose a structure similar to the one used in the 1980s, putting the emphasis on making IMARPE’s data available, and Daniel arrived armed to the teeth with a new methodological arsenal, hoping to influence the powers that be. Their analyses began in 2009 and 2011, but times had changed since the 1980s. Isabel Tsukayama, a guardian angel who died young, was no longer there to protect Daniel, and he was saddled with a Peruvian editorial team with whom he soon had many disagreements. “It doesn’t take much to upset Peruvian managers,” noted Daniel, who did not get along at all well with the director of IMARPE, whom he nicknamed Pistolero after he saw the man pull a revolver on a stubborn underling. In 2011, things came to a head and the divorce was made final. “We already had two-thirds of a book with analyses for a sixty-year period—two years of work for nothing. IMARPE is the only place I’ve ever failed like that. After the success of the 1980s, it was my Waterloo,” laments Daniel. And he is not the only one: at the IRD and in Peru, everyone seems to feel bad about the outcome. For Jaime Mendo, it was “clearly a political problem.”
Back to the 1980s: while Daniel was immersed in his Peruvian project, between 1983 and 1984, ICLARM was experiencing major financial problems. “The Rockefeller Foundation had simply decided to stop financing programs to fight hunger in the third world,” Daniel remembers, “and we had to find a new funder.” Roger Pullin recalls that “despite Daniel’s growing notoriety and his air of confidence, the idea of finding himself unemployed made him very nervous, probably because his own path to success had been so difficult.” A job opened up at the FAO, and Daniel promptly applied. They turned him down, though, and the Rome-based institution hired a French tropical tuna specialist instead. Suddenly without secure funding, he returned to Kiel in 1984 with a contract pieced together by his allies at the oceanographic institute that gave him a few classes to teach and six months to obtain his “habilitation to direct research.”
In Germany, as in France, the habilitation to direct research* is the highest-level diploma available, one step beyond a doctorate, conferring on the bearer the right to direct theses and apply for university professorships. To obtain it, one must produce a written document and pass an oral exam. Often, candidates simply present a collection of their publications, along with a few pages of introduction and a conclusion. But Daniel translated and rewrote everything into perfectly fluent German, churning out 171 pages on his typewriter and adding accents and other special characters by hand. He begins by reminding the reader that tropical fisheries represent 30 percent of the global catch, and often provide 50 percent of the protein available in poor countries. After that comes a vehement critique of the notion of development, which, according to Daniel, too often leads to the destruction of natural resources. Then, Daniel rolls out an elaborate argument developed during his long years in Asia on the inadequacy in tropical climates of methods created by Western researchers. This naturally leads to a very detailed and strongly argued presentation, supported by numerous examples, of ELEFAN’s different modules, which make it possible to study growth and mortality parameters in fish and other tropical marine organisms. He concludes by asking what would be the best method for estimating the proportion of young fish that grow to adulthood,* and presents the latest conceptual developments in modeling, taking into account several species of fish simultaneously. With his characteristic dry humor, Daniel notes, “This document, in its entirety, only covers aspects of population dynamics that correspond with the author’s domains of expertise. He can only hope that these are as significant as he believes them to be.” In the same vein, further down: “This equation is not very elegant and looks complicated, but it only contains five variables.” Daniel likely allowed himself these kinds of liberties because he knew his scientific dossier was already more than enough.
At the end of 1984, Daniel went into his oral examination with the same confidence and found himself face to face with a whole jury full of bigwig researchers. According to his colleagues present that day, Daniel shone once again by his impertinence. “One physicist didn’t agree with some parts of the multispecies models I had recommended,” Daniel recalls. “In front of all the professors of the college of sciences, I told him to his face that physics is easy compared to biology.” Daniel bet on the fact that most of the votes he needed were already won. “I could take the risk of putting this guy in his place, which is probably something no one had done before.” Daniel’s friends still held their breath for him, though, and they think it was probably Gotthilf Hempel’s presence that saved him once again.
Habilitation in hand, Daniel left Germany, returning to his job at ICLARM, where the financial situation had stabilized, and continued to work like a madman. Alan Longhurst contacted him, offering to coauthor a book on tropical ocean ecology. Professor Longhurst was also the director of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Canada. Twenty years older than Daniel, he was an international authority on plankton and was specifically interested in the distribution of phyto- and zooplankton on a planetary scale. This work had led him to define and classify the great marine regions according to their ecological characteristics,8 zones Daniel suggested naming “Longhurst areas.” This global approach made sense to Daniel: “You have to look for the big picture before the details—parochialism is dangerous for everyone, including fisheries biologists,” he says. “I’ve always been struck by Alan’s encyclopedic knowledge,” he adds, “though he acts as though it isn’t important or it’s superficial, but, of course, it isn’t.”
In 1985, Longhurst was nearing retirement. “He was very disappointed,” Daniel remembers, “because the Canadian oceanographic research flotilla was being dismantled—it’s the classic scenario when bureaucrats take control and destroy everything.” Alan sought refuge in writing and soon moved to Cajarc, in southwestern France, where he opened an art gallery with his wife. Daniel accepted the writing partnership despite his numerous more modest occupations. He mainly agreed to take on the project out of admiration for Alan, but also because he knew that it was the best way to firmly anchor his concepts and methods in the scientific literature. Alan promised him “that it would be a brief synthesis.” Daniel flew back and forth to Halifax two or three times. Ultimately, the duo produced 407 pages with 675 bibliographic references, including one from 1927 relative to the work of Théodore Monod. Their book appeared in 19879 with Alan as the architect, writing eight of the ten chapters. The authors’ stated objective was to “break the myth of tropical oceans dominated by coral reefs and mangroves.” In fact, two-thirds of the book covers exploited marine species, particularly fish. In the last two chapters, Daniel expounds and expands on his work from the previous ten years on fish growth, coming back to his favorite themes and tweaking a few noses along the way: “A sojourn of more than a few months on any tropical coast should convince even a myopic Northerner that seasonality exists and is important also in tropical oceans.”
Continuing along these lines, Daniel also discusses the seasonal growth of tropical fish and the growth marks on their otoliths. He notes that “working in the tropics . . . forces one to seek much wider patterns and their possible causes” and relays the comments of an anonymous reviewer from a northern country on some of his work: “Rubbish, may apply in the tropics, but not here.” He takes the opportunity to remind the reader that all extant forms of marine life evolved in conditions comparable to those of our current tropical zones, and only colonized the temperate and polar regions later on. Besides their studies on fish, Daniel and his colleagues also used ELEFAN to analyze the growth of a number of marine invertebrates, including sea urchins, shrimp, shellfish, squid, and later, even jellyfish. In the final chapter of Longhurst and Pauly, therefore, Daniel chose to focus on these marine invertebrates, noting in his preamble that “somewhat like the mythology surrounding tropical fish growth rates, it is easy to believe that the basic biology of invertebrates is so different from fish that population analysis techniques relevant to fish must be inappropriate for invertebrates.” Daniel returned to this debate years later in an article entitled “Why squid, though not fish, may be better understood by pretending they are.”10
Between developing multiple versions of ELEFAN, training sessions for the FAO, the San Miguel Bay project, trips to Peru, co-writing a book with Longhurst, his habilitation to direct research, the other forty or so conference presentations he gave in twenty-two countries on six continents, and directing a dozen or so master’s theses in the Philippines, Daniel’s feet barely touched the ground throughout the 1980s. “The number of items he has left in airplanes—books, wallet, passport, clothes—are enough to start a whole new persona,” jokes Jay Maclean. “He even lost one of ICLARM’s first portable computers, launching a diplomatic crisis with the administration. And another time, he called from somewhere in Papua New Guinea having simply used up all his cash, credit cards not being of much use there, and had to wait days for a money transfer from Manila. The result was that everyone around him had to fuss to some extent to make sure he was complete in his documentation, traveler’s checks, and so on, before he left on a trip.”
“I get dizzy when I think about those years,” admits Daniel, who published nearly two hundred scientific articles, one hundred and forty of which he signed as first author, and who would often be absent for eight months out of the year. The stories he read to his children arrived via airmail, recorded on cassette tapes. Ilya and Angela don’t remember suffering from their father’s absences, though Angela admits, “This family wouldn’t exist without my mother.”
During the short periods he spent in Manila, Daniel followed a strict routine. Up with the sun, around five or six in the morning, lots of coffee and fruit on the terrace with Sandra and the children, an hour of traffic, either alone with his driver or with a few colleagues for an early-morning chat. He would also go to lunch with Jay, Roger, Deng, and a few others, almost always at the Singapura, a stone’s throw from ICLARM. “They made an excellent Hainanese chicken and rice; I would order that or squid in hot sauce,” reminisces Daniel, whom everyone describes as having “a healthy appetite.” “He was famous for sampling the plates around him after he finished,” Jay would write later. “And he usually finished first even though eating hardly slowed down his conversation. Then he might realize only at the end of a meal that he had no cash and would turn to the nearest person (‘Oh my gosh,’ as if it hadn’t ever happened before) and grab his or her upper arm in a rough sort of plea for a loan, and we knew that he was quite sincere, just absentminded, and the lunch money thing actually became a light topic in itself about whose turn it was to pay for Daniel. Then, the next time, he would pay for everybody, and the whole thing would become confused, although we knew it was contrived by then and all took part because it was a way of decompressing after the inevitably weighty discussions we had during lunch, for Daniel’s presence always meant that we would descend bathyspherically deep into whatever topic came up, whether science, politics, religion, or problems in the office, this before his soup even arrived.”
In the evenings, Daniel would spend another hour in traffic to make the six-mile trip home, eat dinner with the family while talking about his research or current events, and go to sleep with the sun. “Daniel was no night owl and disappeared pretty quickly, leaving Sandra to take care of any guests they might have,” Siebren Venema recalls. “My father burns the candle at both ends,” explains his son, Ilya. “When he feels good, it gives him the strength to work hard, and when he’s feeling bad, he hides behind his work—I can remember him at the house, running toward his office to escape.”
The engine soon overheated, however—too many manuscripts and grant applications, too many nights in airplanes and too much jet lag. One day at the Singapura, without warning, Daniel Pauly collapsed face-first into his plate. “He’d been well-fed for a few years by that point, and it wasn’t easy to get him out the door to take him to the hospital,” his colleagues remember. After a few days of rest, everything was fine, but the doctors told him it was a serious warning sign. Daniel ignored it.
* Called the HDR or Habilitation à diriger des recherches in French. (TN)
* What experts call “recruitment.”