KIEL, FEBRUARY 1992. I was studying for my final exams in physical oceanography and marine biology. There was a gargantuan amount of knowledge to absorb, from the cardiovascular system of the dogfish (Scyliorhinus canicula) to the dynamics of polar sea ice. Over the last six months, review sheets had piled up in my basement apartment, a sort of burrow that I shared with my girlfriend, Katharina, for whom I had left France three years earlier. Meanwhile, she toiled away at her studies in political science and art history—we rarely saw the light of day, sometimes holding contests to see whose skin was paler and washing down copious amounts of buttered toast with black tea. A virus I had caught during my annual visit home to France had affected the nerve endings of my inner ear, leaving me with six months of seasickness on dry land. At first, the doctors thought it was a brain tumor, but ultimately, a young tropical disease specialist identified the little vermin that was responsible for my suffering. No treatment was necessary; I just had to wait for my synapses to regenerate on their own. When I finally emerged from our subterranean shelter, I walked stiffly, forced to keep my gaze fixed on the horizon to avoid careening into the gutter—for years after that, I couldn’t look up at the sky without falling over.
Time was running out to prepare for exams, so I kept cramming, with some help from my classmates, especially Antje Helms. We studied together once or twice a week in her spacious, sunny apartment in the town center. Sitting on the floor of her room, we would pick review sheets from a pile at random and the oceanography game show would begin. Antje (today a campaign manager for Greenpeace) always knew the right answer—my performance was a bit less consistent. I was grateful for her gentle encouragement, and her calm attitude helped me keep a level head.
Among other things, we were expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of fisheries, and Antje convinced me to have a look at the new catalog of fish species available at IfM’s library. I wove my way through the bookshelves and found myself in front of the library’s only public computer, where I was given a few floppy disks with a neat logo featuring two fish, nose to nose: a bluish specimen from the African lakes and a pink coral reef dweller. The first floppy clicked and hummed in the disk drive, giving up its secrets. The interface was primitive, typical of the years before Windows took over. Since I was in a Hanseatic city on the Baltic Sea that, like Lübeck, owed its early fortunes to the herring, I decided to look up the page devoted to that species first. There was no photo at the top of the page, but rather a digital drawing of the silver fish, whose features had been reproduced pixel by pixel. Following the species’ Latin name (Clupea harengus) were its names in various European languages, its biological characteristics, its distribution range, and many other interesting tidbits. This up-to-date summary would save me hours of library research, and I printed off the page enthusiastically, along with the ones for cod, smelt, and plaice, making the dot matrix printer click and hum for a good fifteen minutes. Like a few hundred other people in the year 1992, I had just discovered FishBase. A quarter century later, in 2017, this ichthyological encyclopedia would have millions of users all over the world.
“IN 1985, WHEN Daniel came to Kiel to get his habilitation to direct research, I had the office next to his. He was fascinating. It was like he’d switched a light on: he did a single presentation, and all of a sudden, I understood why I was studying fish growth, mortality, the reason for it all. Plus, Daniel was also way cooler than my professors at the time. There were a lot of pacifist protests going on against the Pershing missiles, and he wore the badge with the white dove on the blue background.”
Rainer Froese tells me about his first meeting with Daniel, in the hall of the oceanographic institute in Kiel, where he still works. As his name suggests, Rainer Froese is from Northern Germany. Rainer also has the dry accent and straight spine characteristic of the men from that region, softened by several decades of research in the tropics. A native of Wismar, in the former East Germany, he grew up in the Rhineland after his parents fled the communist regime. His father had served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, so when Rainer received his high school diploma in 1970, the young man was less than eager to complete his mandatory military service. He went to sea to escape conscription, earning his commercial captain’s license and navigating the oceans for two years, mainly aboard supertankers. “I understood that sea travel, especially tankers, was polluting the oceans, that the whole enterprise was only about halfway legal,” he says. Rainer was first mate and radio officer, so he often received messages from the shipowner, such as, “Make sure the hold is clean when you get to Rotterdam”—a thinly disguised order to pump seawater into the empty tanks, then release the water and oil residues back into the ocean, an illegal practice. “I decided to quit my job as first mate, even though it paid well, and start from scratch as a biology student, with the goal of getting food from the oceans instead of polluting them.”
Rainer moved to Hamburg, then Kiel in 1980, where he completed his master’s degree and his doctorate. A lifelong aquarist, he financed his whole college education by selling aquarium fish—“It was a crappy job; I was happy to turn it back into a hobby after that,” he tells me, laughing into his beard. In 1987, Daniel was passing through Kiel again when he learned that Rainer had an interest in artificial intelligence and expert systems.* “Those were the early days of computing,” Rainer remembers. “I had started programming, and I designed a routine that could identify the species of fish larvae based on their morphological characteristics. Daniel burst into my office with boxes of index cards, each one containing growth parameters for a species of fish. It was the database he’d created while working on his thesis, with more than five hundred species. Daniel wanted to make it available to his colleagues in developing countries.” The man himself would give a more detailed description of his motivations in the introduction to a 1991 article on the subject, coauthored with Rainer:
“Unfortunately, nothing is known on the biology of . . .” How many times have we read this silly little phrase—or a variant thereof—in papers or reports on the resources forming the basis of tropical and subtropical fisheries? A silly phrase it is because it is generally not true—it reflects only the information available to its author.1
Daniel was raring to go as usual, but Rainer puzzled over the best way to move forward: “Daniel’s cards looked simple, but to put them in an electronic format, we’d have to create twenty, thirty different tables that all had to be connected to each other.” With a draft of the database in his luggage, Rainer came to Manila in 1988, where he stayed with the Paulys for two months while he talked Daniel and his colleagues through the exact content of what would come to be called FishBase: species classification, morphology and physiology, population dynamics, ecology, reproduction, diet, et cetera.
Daniel quickly presented the project to ICLARM, announcing that the database would cover some 2,500 species. “There was a moment,” Rainer remembers, “when I was sitting in this tiny office staring at my computer and I realized that if we started this, it would eventually have to include all the fish in the world, that it would become this huge thing.” Indeed, at the time there were already over twenty thousand fish species known to science—but nothing could stop Daniel now. Rainer insisted on setting up a collaboration with the FAO, where Walter Fischer and his successors had already created similar databases starting in the 1970s. Daniel dragged his feet: “They’ll only create more problems . . .” But the two eventually flew to Rome early in 1989 to sign a pact of nonaggression with their UN colleagues. “After that, one of our partners from the FAO worked on the project for a year, then he left, and from that point on we didn’t get anything else out of them,” Rainer sums up.
At ICLARM, on the other hand, it was only the beginning. Daniel and Rainer bought one of the first PCs equipped with the famous Intel 80386 processor and hired Susan Luna and Belen Acosta, who would be in charge of inputting the data extracted from every available scientific resource: books, articles, reports . . . Then Rainer submitted a grant application to the European Commission, which was approved after much internal lobbying by Cornelia Nauen, Daniel’s lifelong friend and former classmate, who had already been working at the EC’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development in Brussels for several years. Rainer moved to Manila with his family in 1990 and stayed for ten years. The FishBase team recruited like crazy, and the number of PCs multiplied, the machines lined up and transformed into a digitization chain. They passed the six-thousand-species mark in 1992; then in 1994, the floppy disk gave way to the CD, which they distributed to four hundred research organizations in sixty-two countries. In 1995, Robert McCall and Robert May of Oxford University test-drove FishBase for the scientific journal Nature. In an article titled “More Than a Seafood Platter,” they conclude:
In short, Fishbase draws together and makes accessible a huge amount of information about fish and fisheries, much of which was previously buried in the “grey literature” of reports from fisheries institutes or working parties . . . Perhaps most important, and certainly closest to the authors’ hearts, it will benefit developing countries, where the lack of comprehensive libraries is often keenly felt.2
In 1996, FishBase went on the internet, a technological advancement that couldn’t have arrived at a better time for Rainer, Daniel, and the rest of the FishBase team, who had pioneered big data* and open access. The new home page for the piscine database, which now covered more than fifteen thousand species and had at the time already thousands of users, was the work of Tom Froese, Rainer’s teenage son, who knew his way around computers. At the same time, a second, larger grant from the European Union came through, allowing the team to spread the good news throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania through training courses in Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Namibia, New Caledonia, and Senegal, where they promoted the use of FishBase and the orderly collection of information on marine biodiversity. The tireless Michael Vakily (who had been in ICLARM’s orbit since the San Miguel Bay project) and Deng Palomares hit the road.
“We were a flying circus,” Deng remembers. “I spent years up in the air—and I never want to travel like that again. One time, I ended up on a long-haul flight on Christmas Eve! Luckily, Michael is a sweet guy and I liked traveling with him. He’s very humble and very positive, whatever happens. In Africa, for instance, we often had big money problems, and the administration was slow to respond, but Michael always kept his cool. He’s one of the German colleagues who played an important role in Daniel’s career, like we did in the Philippines.” On the other hand, at the beginning of their collaboration, Deng found Rainer Froese a little too serious, but she learned to like him. “Rainer prefers objectivity to optimism, though he’ll respect you even if he disagrees with you; he’s someone who has a lot of heart even if he doesn’t show it, and I trust him.”
FishBase’s stated objective was to cover every fish species by the year 2000, the equivalent of a forty-volume encyclopedia. The team now had fifteen members, including eight working on encoding data.
During my stay in the Philippines in 2017, I met most of the original FishBase team. The team, which is mostly made up of women, is now based in Los Baños, on the compound of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), part of a huge campus belonging to the University of the Philippines, where the heat and humidity are slowly moldering the buildings into a state of romantic dilapidation beneath the shade of some giant acacia trees. Their offices look out over huge experimental rice fields and, farther away, the last remains of the old-growth forest that covers Mount Makiling, where hikers brave bloodsucking leeches. The whole FishBase team heaved a sigh of relief in 2000 when the project left behind the pandemonium of Manila to set up shop in this green paradise.
In the early 1990s, FishBase recruited its staff from among Daniel’s former students at the University of the Philippines, notably its Marine Science Institute. Apparently, he’d made quite an impression. “I like the practical aspect of his teaching,” Emily Capuli tells me, adding with a laugh: “He really knew how to explain things in simple terms and he gestured a lot while lecturing—it was hard to fall asleep in his classes.” Daniel, whose primary concern was academic excellence, appearances be damned, stood out from the very hierarchy-conscious Filipino professors. “He was very generous with praise,” says Cris Binohlan, “which really boosted our confidence.”
They all agree, however, that they were initially intimidated, even terrified, by what they perceived as a human mountain, a creature from another world. “His idea of a ‘break’ was to wander around the office and very obviously look over your shoulder. He even did it to people who didn’t work for him,” Cris recalls. “And since he was usually in his socks, we couldn’t hear him coming, which was freaky.” Daniel usually arrived at FishBase central in the middle of the day since their offices were on a different floor from his. “We were all on our computers, and he would come to see each one of us to ask us about our work, correct mistakes, teach us things,” Armi Torres tells me. She adds, “In the early days, he would do a presentation on a family of fish about once a week, covering its population dynamics, of course. Later on, it was our turn and we would present the group for which we were synthesizing information at the time. Doctor Pauly is such a hard worker that we would have been ashamed of ourselves if we didn’t do as much.” Fishing for information in an ocean of not-always-accessible scientific literature written in several languages doesn’t sound like a very exciting job to me. I ask the women about why they keep at this dry task, cataloging the fish of the world, day after day, year after year. “Some people aren’t suited for it,” Susan Luna answers calmly, “but I love it, and I never get tired of it. You need to have the soul of a lace-maker—actually, in our spare time, us FishBase girls organize sewing and knitting workshops.”
Daniel and his young colleagues didn’t associate much outside of work, but they got to know each other over the years. “After a while, we were close enough to be able to tease each other in a friendly way, without offending,” says Emily Capuli. “When Holy Week rolled around, he’d say, ‘When are you going to crucify your god again?’ He was provocative like that, but it really made you think, and we could always agree to disagree.” Cris Binohlan concludes, “He made jokes, we joked back. I would tell him, ‘You and Saint Peter have something in common—you’re both interested in fishing!’ He laughed till he cried!” When it comes to Rainer, the women all agree: he is the perfect boss—easy to talk to, relaxed, and good at giving clear instructions. “In twentyfive years, I think I’ve seen him lose his temper once,” Cris tells me.
Classifying different fish species within FishBase soon turned out to be an intimidatingly complex task. Daniel and Rainer, who were no taxonomists,* sought help from a specialist, recruiting Nicolas Bailly of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris in 1996. “The first FishBase was set up as though fish taxonomy were complete, like there was nothing left to discover,” Nicolas tells me when we see each other in Manila in early 2017. He has just arrived from France, and, like me, he is suffering through his jet lag in silence. “It usually takes me two weeks to get back to sleeping normally,” he tells me with a sigh. Nicolas is celebrating twenty years with the FishBase project—of which he has been scientific director since 2011—and sixteen years of marriage to one Deng Palomares. Besides Nicolas’s phenomenal knowledge of systematics,† Deng appreciates his Gallic frankness and his sharp Parisian accent. On his end, Nicolas has adjusted marvelously to the paramilitary order that Deng imposes on their various residences all over the world. The couple has also racked up hundreds of hours of diving in many beautiful coral reefs. Nicolas never tires of exploring them, outfitted in vintage equipment worthy of Jacques Cousteau, nor of playing the clown to make his wife smile. During this already-torrid January in the southern hemisphere, Deng offers to put me up for a few days in their apartment in downtown Manila. In the mornings and evenings, Nicolas plays “Wish You Were Here” on the guitar, and we enjoy some quiet moments together.
In the first few years after its creation, the species classification system in FishBase did not conform to any particular norm. Starting in 1998, it was aligned with the Catalog of Fishes put in place by Bill Eschmeyer of the California Academy of Sciences, which makes regular updates following species discoveries, extinctions, name changes, and corrections. As a “diplomatic” gesture, Nicolas wrote an essay to confirm that FishBase was not intended to replace the Catalog of Fishes but rather to help complete it.3 “Some taxonomists turn up their noses at FishBase,” Nicolas admits. “We keep putting all the information online for free that they want to sell in their identification books.” Later, Nicolas and Deng translated the entirety of FishBase into French, mainly so it could be used in francophone Africa; this version launched during a conference in Dakar in 1999.
Aside from coordinating digitization activities and research related to FishBase, responding to repeated criticism became one of Nicolas, Deng, Rainer, and Daniel’s most important jobs. According to its detractors, FishBase was riddled with mistakes, and providing summaries of extant information was not in itself a legitimate research activity.
Their response to the first attack could be summed up as: “Why don’t you do it yourself if you’re so smart?” More precisely, Deng and Nicolas reminded everyone that, from their perspective, nothing could replace manual data input, which is still the norm at FishBase after twenty-five years. Indeed, automated data-extraction techniques like those used by the Encyclopedia of Life* lead to much higher error rates. These rates were initially estimated at 5 percent for FishBase. In the context of such a huge mass of data, that means thousands of errors, but it’s all about your point of view: scientists using FishBase for a large number of species in the context of a comparative study would shrug, whereas a specialist looking for a particular piece of information on a single species would find such mistakes intolerable.4 And what’s more, because it is online and participatory, FishBase works on the potluck model: its users are also its contributors, and are therefore responsible for suggesting additions and corrections. “We accept criticism gratefully, even if it’s harsh,” Armi Torres tells me with a smile. “Insults are rare, and we do get praise.” “Thanks to constant updates,” Daniel concludes, “the error rate is way down, lower even than most of the published works on fishes.”
When it comes to the second issue, though, the problem is mostly a cultural one. “I’ve never heard an oceanographer or a meteorologist question the fact that global databases are part of their sciences,” asserts Rainer Froese.5 Indeed, people who look down on humble naturalists counting critters in jars are less quick to dismiss those who do the same with whole galaxies. Nevertheless, in light of climate change and our present planetwide biodiversity crisis, there are now few who would question the importance of large-scale ecological studies and the construction of databases to go with them. This “big data” approach, still a novelty when FishBase debuted, has since become the norm. To quash any possible doubt on this point, Kostantinos Stergiou and Athanassios Tsikliras of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki confirmed that FishBase had been used in 653 publications between 1995 and 2006.6
The encyclopedia’s success is such that, in 2005, its founders decided to go a step further and create SeaLifeBase, with the goal of widening the catalog to include all marine species. With the support of the Oak Foundation,* six additional research assistants joined the team in Los Baños. The first pages of the new database went online in 2008, and less than ten years later, it covered over 74,000 species and received 1.5 million hits per month from more than four thousand regular users all over the world.
The successes of FishBase and SeaLifeBase were intoxicating, but they hid an increasingly precarious financial situation. It became clear in the late 1990s that ICLARM, which had suffered a series of funding-related crises, could not support the programs long-term. Their funding from the European Commission was substantial, but no one thought it would last. In 2000, FishBase finally covered every known fish species, and Rainer, Daniel, and their colleagues came out with a prodigious user’s manual. The same year, a consortium was set up between ICLARM, the FAO, and various institutions in eight countries. But this collaboration didn’t cover salaries for the FishBase team and, in practice, balancing the budget has turned out to be difficult. Each year around the same time, Rainer, Cornelia, Deng, and Daniel break out in a cold sweat. This was notably the case during my visit to Manila in 2017.
While Deng pelted potential funders with messages, Cornelia Nauen swooped in to help once again, along with Loida Corpus, one of Daniel’s former students, who is based in Singapore and had friends in high places. Tensions mounted in the meeting room, but strangely, out in the offices, serenity reigned supreme. I shared a work space with two of Deng’s assistants, who are barely twenty years old. One of the young women hummed to herself as she worked, sitting cross-legged in an armchair. Susan Luna, who began working here at that age in the 1980s, tells me that she and her eight colleagues have been there since FishBase first launched: “We’re like a big family—it’s nice growing old together.”
* Computer programs using some form of artificial intelligence to simulate the assessments of people with specialized knowledge, e. g., in medicine or taxonomy.
* The use of extremely large datasets, a practice that is now very widespread.
* People who have the skills to describe, name, group, and classify living organisms.
† The science of classification.
* See eol.org.
* Philanthropic foundation headquartered in Geneva.
La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1955. “They always let me know that I was different. They told me over and over again that my mother had rejected me, that I should be grateful, that without them, I would have died of hunger. Little by little, their grief over losing their youngest son turned into greed, and I became their servant. As soon as I was old enough to work, I was seen as a resource.”
Avize, Marne, France, 1938. She had her father’s long face and her mother’s steely gaze and sharp mind. Everyone agreed that Renée should continue her studies, and her schoolmistress supported her as far as she could. But her father wouldn’t hear of it: “She’ll work like the rest of them,” he declared. And so at the age of fifteen, Renée began her first job as a domestic in Nancy.
La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1956. Daniel with Monsieur G, “a good man who was dominated by a terrible shrew.”
Wuppertal, Germany, 1964. Daniel slept very little between the factory, his classes, and his ever-accelerating bibliophagy.
Daniel and Walter Kühhirt with Daniel’s cousin Winifred Whitfield (Ed’s sister) in California, 1969. Meeting his family and seeing a Black America that was fighting for its civil rights was like an electric shock for Daniel’s politics and identity.
Java Sea, Indonesia, 1975. “A typical tow would yield two hundred kilograms (440 pounds) of fish, and there were 150 different species, of which only 80 were known,” Daniel marvels.
Baccalaureate, Wuppertal, Germany, 1969. The article, from the spring of 1969, specifies that twenty-four of the twenty-five candidates, with an average age of twenty-five, passed the nine written tests and almost as many orals. Only a few of the candidates were interested in going on to higher education. A single student is named in the article, one Daniel Pauly from Paris, France, who declared that he had paid for his own schooling and wanted to go on to study biology.
Ed Whitfield, at the Presidential Scholars ceremony, the White House, Washington, DC, 1967. “I wanted to refuse it. At the time, I was already active in the NAACP youth chapter and very much opposed to the war in Vietnam. And then I thought about it and I realized, if I do this, my mother will kill me. That’s one thing that I kind of regret. I would have been the only person ever to do that.”
Ed Whitfield, Greensboro, North Carolina, 2016. “My ambition in life was never to try and figure out if I could make myself successful. I was always trying to figure out how I could bring my community along, and that’s why, fifty years later, I’m still marching, even if I’m not as quick as I used to be.”
Manila, the Philippines, 1979. “By inviting a young Black scientist, Jack Marr showed that he had an attitude that was uncommon for a white American of his generation,” Daniel notes, remembering that Marr welcomed him with a very simple to-do list: “You are going to develop a theory of tropical fisheries.”
Kiel, Germany, 1972. Daniel’s room (1969–1974).
Kiel, Germany, 1978. “We decided that we were both ‘young, gifted and Black’ and we should get married. He asked me if I would, and I said, ‘Yes, surely why not.’ That’s how that happened. It was just one of those very pragmatic things.” She moved in with him in Kiel and never returned to London to finish her doctorate.
Daniel with the Wade family (except for Sandra’s sister, Cheryl, who took the photo), Seaside, California, 1980. “For a Black family, the United States was hostile territory—you had to plan your trip as if you were crossing the Sahara, identifying the oases in advance so that you could stop safely.”
Manila, the Philippines, 1981–83. The next year, Sandra gave birth to a little girl. The Paulys named her Angela as a tribute to the famous African American activist… A photo from that time shows the Paulys, now a family of four, standing under some palm trees on the beach: a peaceful postcard from their tropical exile.
Daniel with Maria Lourdes Palomares, aka Deng (to his left) and Isabel Tsukayama (facing Deng), Callao, Peru, 1987. Deng: “There was a real intellectual compatibility between [Isabel] and Daniel even though she was very conventional and he was a lot more rock and roll.”
Deng Palomares, Manila, the Philippines, 1983. Deng’s story is emblematic of the destiny of many of Daniel Pauly’s young colleagues from the tropics, unfairly caught up in the turmoil of postcolonial history, far from the comparatively insulated atmosphere of research laboratories in the Global North.
Kiel, Germany, 1984. “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.
Daniel on the day of his examination for his habilitation to direct research, Kiel, Germany, 1985. Suddenly without secure funding, Daniel 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… At the end of 1984, he 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.
Ecopath model, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1984. Polovina drew a diagram that looked like a subway map: each station, marked by a box, represents one functional group, and the lines between the stations indicate who eats whom.
Ecopath Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1990. A photo shows Villy and Daniel—more than a little proud—standing on each side of one of those posters. The author is one A. D. Pongase of ICLARM. They often joked about him back in Manila. In fact, Pongase—roughly “put yourself there!” in Spanish—was a fictional colleague that Jay Maclean had invented while he was working in Australia.
Fish growth, Manila, the Philippines, 1990. Annabelle Cruz-Trinidad: “Daniel used to give out really difficult tasks around five PM; the staff would dread that moment, but he would call us ‘marvelous’ in the most charming way.”
Tubbataha, the Philippines, 1992. Jay: “Daniel’s diving followed the same absentmindedness as his terrestrial pursuits. His near-legendary exploits sometimes brought him into close proximity with ‘Z’—the fisheries scientists’ term for ‘total mortality.’”
Manila, the Philippines, Christmas 1984. Daniel: “Before ICLARM had its crisis, I’d intended to spend the rest of my life in the Philippines, maybe retire to the seaside, in Anilao perhaps. I liked the Philippines, and the feeling was mutual.”
Winston McLemore, Daniel’s biological father, Seaside, California, 1982. Winston and his wife, Mary, welcomed Daniel into their home, but things didn’t click the way they had with the Whitfields. Winston voted Republican and his worldview was diametrically opposed to that of his son.
Louis Pauly, aka Loulou, La Creuse, France, ca. 1994–95. Louis had been raised by social services—after growing up in various orphanages, he had generous ideas about family ties, and he adopted Daniel without even meeting him.
Cornelia Nauen and Gotthilf Hempel, Kiel, Germany, 2016. Cornelia had fled the Ruhr (“a concrete desert”) and a stiflingly conservative home. Daniel’s seriousness and maturity impressed her, and he appreciated her in turn for her absolute loyalty, rigor, and industrious good humor. . . At the oceanographic institute in Kiel, fisheries biology was a big deal, overseen by a major authority figure—Gotthilf Hempel. This formidable professor is the most influential German oceanographer of the twentieth century.
Fishing down marine food webs, Manila, the Philippines, 1998. Rachel Atanacio is the one who drew, pixel by pixel, each species of fish that appeared in the first version of that famous ichthyological encyclopedia. Illustrating fishing down marine food webs was her first time working with Daniel. “I’m an artist, not a scientist,” she tells me. “He had to explain to me exactly what he wanted, but I suggested adding the diagonal arrow that highlights the general decline.”
Daniel and Philippe Cury at the award ceremony for the Albert I medal, Paris, 2016. Philippe and Daniel have known each other “forever” but can’t recall the exact date of their first meeting. It was almost certainly at a research laboratory in Monterey, California—the same town where Steinbeck set his novel Cannery Row.
Jennifer Jacquet, New York, 2016. According to Jacquet and her colleagues, the Marine Stewardship Council’s criteria are quite simply too relaxed and the environmental benefits they promise too nebulous.
Artisanal fishing in Senegal. Over dinner, I was told about the heroic daily lives of the piroguiers and the scrappy resourcefulness of hungry children who snatch small fish off the boats as they come ashore. My African family also complained about the armada of foreign ships that were pillaging African waters. This shameful practice had been going on for some time already and took several forms, but to put it bluntly, the whole world was helping themselves to the marine resources off the Senegalese coast.
Renée and Angela at a retirement home near Guéret (in La Creuse, France), 2013. “La Creuse helped me make my peace with France,” reminisces Daniel, who enjoyed the beautiful countryside and talked with his mother from morning till night.
Ilya and Angela Pauly, Montreal, Canada, 2002. “He’s trying to wake people up, so I can forgive him for a lot, for being away so much, just because of that.”
The Pauly siblings, Louis Pauly’s funeral, La Vallade, La Creuse, France, 2003. “They were exhausted from all those years of work,” one of their neighbors told me. “Loulou didn’t live to be very old. You could tell they hadn’t been very happy in Paris, but here, they were.”
Daniel and his books, Vancouver, 2005. “Of course, Darwin’s ideas fascinated me,” Daniel tells me, “but as I read on, I got to know him as an extraordinarily sensitive and likable human being. That’s not often the way with famous men—usually, when you get beneath the surface, you discover a monster.”
Anilao, the Philippines, 1986. He would, however, look down his nose at the joys of coral reef diving for many years. Once, he gloomily told Jay that “all I see down there is conflict, fish spending their time chasing each other and fighting—I’m swimming through the tragedies of the deep.”
Award ceremony for the Cosmos Prize, Tokyo, 2005. Starting in the early 2000s, the honors just kept flooding in, making him the most decorated marine biologist in the history of the discipline.
Proust Questionnaire, Nature, 2003.
Q: How would you like to be remembered?
A: As the one who showed that the effect of fisheries on marine life is equivalent to that of a large meteor strike on terrestrial life.