“DR. PAULY HAS been alternately described by colleagues as inspiring, arrogant, brilliant and aggravating. Some call him a heretic, ‘the Prophet Daniel.’”1
“For better or worse, he’s probably had a greater impact on the field than any member of his generation.”2
Though there was some gnashing of teeth, Daniel’s career had reached its apogee. His articles and those of the Sea Around Us were being published in the best scientific journals on the planet and cited thousands of times, though this certainly didn’t stop him from authoring and coauthoring a dozen more papers, book chapters, and reports for less prestigious outlets each year. Always a generous writer, Daniel would produce a text for anyone who asked politely for a few pages on fish and the state of the world’s fisheries. As his beloved Darwin put it, his mind “seemed to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”3 But unlike Darwin, who was literally nauseated by public speaking, Daniel excelled at treading the boards. “You have to get the audience’s attention as quickly as possible, just like an actor,” he explained to me. “Of course, I get stage fright, but after the first couple of minutes, if the public is with you, it’s an immense pleasure.” Invited to speak all over the world, he began appearing at about fifteen conferences a year, rarely refusing an opportunity to travel. “When I get on a plane,” he jokes, “I turn into a cold-blooded animal. My metabolism slows down, and I just wait till it’s over. That’s how I’m able to stand the inevitable delays, detours, and other unpleasantness.” At international conferences, no one wanted to go on after him, other speakers dreaded his questions, and they walked on eggshells around him during meetings.
The media gradually discovered some of the details of his picaresque early life alongside his scientific exploits. Several long profiles followed, including one in his beloved New York Times in 2003. That same year, Nature published his responses to a science-themed Proust Questionnaire.4 Some of his answers proved revealing:
Summarize yourself in the form of a title of a paper in Nature.
Longitudinal single case study documents instance of a scientist “making it” notwithstanding apparent lack of key skills.
What book has been most influential in your scientific career?
Leftist political tracts swirling about in the 1960s, which convinced me that I should study something that would “serve the people,” rather than indulge in my literary, historical and philosophical interests. As it turned out, I was able to do it all.
Where and when would you most like to have lived or worked?
Subtract a few decades and I, as a black person, could not have been an academic anywhere. So I much prefer the present.
What music would you have played at your funeral?
Aretha Franklin’s “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.”
How would you like to be remembered?
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.
What’s just around the corner?
A representation of global ocean ecosystems that we immodestly call “World Model,” contrasting the structure of present marine ecosystems, and their fish biomass, with those of the 1950s. This should help to settle the issue of fisheries impacts, as well as providing a solid framework for discussions about future global fish supply as required, for example, by the United Nations-sponsored Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
In 2003, Daniel also became director of the UBC Fisheries Centre in Vancouver, a responsibility that he accepted “as a final resort, just to make sure someone horrible didn’t end up with the job.” With a little over a million dollars a year, the Pew grant allowed him to enlarge the staff of the Sea Around Us. In particular, he prided himself on being able to direct ten doctoral students at once. With his research assistants, Daniel remained as charming as ever, dogmatic but with a sense of humor, just like in the old days in Manila. With his PhD students, though, it was another story. Daniel set the bar astronomically high, and, considering his own capacity for work and ease when it comes to writing, he has never understood why his students don’t advance at lighting speed. According to most of his colleagues, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for those young researchers to exist intellectually next to Daniel Pauly. As a result, his students after 2000 don’t always have a good relationship with their maestro, but it is telling that they all acknowledge his influence on their work. His team is, as usual, both international and mostly female. “I usually get along better with women. Young men, sooner or later, always feel the need to test me,” he tells me with a glint of humor in his eyes. Daniel almost never makes hires based on a resumé, relying mostly on chance meetings and recommendations from his considerable network of associates.
This network and the contacts he maintains in different places around the globe have earned him eight honorary university degrees. The first was, logically, an honorary professorship from IfM in Kiel. The second, somewhat surprisingly, came from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The man behind this distinction, Kostas Stergiou, is director of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. According to Kostas’s younger colleagues, “When Daniel comes to Greece, he’s greeted like a rock star.” Daniel’s Mediterranean alter ego is an elegant, white-haired man with sea-blue eyes. In his rough smoker’s voice, Kostas tells me about their first meeting:
I met Daniel Pauly for the first time in Athens in 1992, during the first World Fisheries Congress. We had a long discussion in the shadow of the Acropolis—over juice (him, he is a teetotaler) and ouzo (me)—on various scientific issues. The next year, when we spent a week together in Monterey, California . . . we had the opportunity to extensively discuss various issues; one thing I remember from our discussions is what he told me at one point, “We will grow old together. . .” Back then, Daniel was a very charismatic speaker, enthusiastic, motivated, revolutionary, persistent (he never lets his ideas go unnoticed) . . . He is also an unconditional friend. He likes movies and TV series a lot, and during one of my visits to Vancouver I set up a home cinema for him.
DANIEL SURFED ON a wave of success, but an important ordeal still awaited him. Usually cheerful, his voice grows serious as he tells me this story: “It was in late January 2005; I’d been working like crazy all week, sending in a draft of one article and editing another.” Sandra, now supervising an international baccalaureate program, spent the day at a conference, then went to dinner in downtown Vancouver with some coworkers. She invited her husband and Angela, who was living with her parents while she completed her master’s degree at UBC, to come with them. “I was so overworked and on edge that I felt like a runaway train,” Daniel remembers. He parked downtown and went for a walk alone to calm his nerves. “I was in sorry shape,” he admits.
He made it to the restaurant late, but still in time to see Sandra’s colleagues. “Daniel was quite popular at those events,” she tells me. “That night, he quickly got into a very animated discussion with one of my French colleagues—but suddenly, he told us it was time to go. Angela and I both thought that was strange.” Sandra offered to drive, but Daniel refused. Their home on the UBC campus was only fifteen minutes away. “While I was driving, I started to feel strange,” Daniel recalls. “When we got back, I had all the symptoms of a stroke, which was affecting my right side, but I could still stand and I decided to just go to bed. If I’d been in my right mind, if I’d been able to better evaluate the situation, I would have gone straight to the university hospital, just around the corner, where they would have given me anticoagulants. But I went to bed and the next day, it was too late.” Daniel woke the next morning and pretended everything was fine. Despite falling a couple of times in the bathroom, he managed to get dressed. At breakfast, though, he was finally exposed—he couldn’t hold his knife. “We were terrified,” Angela tells me. “He didn’t want to hear anything about it,” Sandra adds, “but we called my sister Cheryl in California.” Cheryl is a psychologist with a good knowledge of medicine. She is also, as Angela notes, “the only person who can get Daniel to budge at times like that.”
“When we arrived at the hospital, there was nothing to be done, really,” Daniel tells me with a hitch in his voice. “The brain tissue around the clot was already dead.” Daniel suffered some facial paralysis, which disappeared after the first week. Still, he had lost the use of his right arm and had a limp on the same side. “I was supposed to leave for England that day to meet Prince Charles. It’s ridiculous, but I felt so guilty about canceling.” Daniel was also terrified at the idea that his mind may have been affected: “When they were doing the first tests, they asked me to name twenty animals and I forced myself to remember the names of twenty dinosaurs.”
He put everything on hold for a whole month, except for a book review, which he wrote the day after his stroke just to assure himself that he wasn’t “a vegetable.” “It was one of his best reviews, actually,” insists Sandra. He also spoke regularly to the journalist Bruce Knecht, who called him seeking advice for his hard-hitting book on the illegal exploitation of Patagonian toothfish (often marketed as Chilean sea bass), a species recently discovered by deep-ocean trawlers.5 But most of the time, Daniel was completely exhausted. For the first time since he lived in Kiel with Sandra, he watched TV, finally discovering the strange and wonderful series that so fascinate the rest of humanity. Meanwhile, Daniel and Sandra received a flood of supportive messages. “I especially liked the one from Rainer Froese,” Sandra relates. “He titled it Austeigen verboten.”* In the scientific community, news of Daniel’s stroke spread like wildfire, inspiring a lot of sympathy, but also a few knowing smiles: they might finally be rid of that troublemaker Daniel Pauly.
He recovered quickly, though, thanks to a series of in-home treatments during which needles were plunged deep into the muscles of his shoulders and back. “It took about a dozen sessions, four or five per month, each with fifty needles or so,” explains Daniel, without mentioning the pain caused by these porcupine attacks. He gradually regained the use of his right hand, then his elbow, then his whole arm, though not his fine motor skills. “It does make me angry that Daniel didn’t take the time to finish his rehab,” Sandra admits. “It would have improved his physical condition significantly. But Daniel wasn’t interested—he just kept working, as usual.”
“I still feel the effects some,” Daniel admits. “I can’t whistle. I can’t type with both hands like I learned to do at school in La Chaux-de-Fonds. I can't jump. When I am tired, I have a slight limp.” Daniel had never been so happy to be left-handed and mentally thanked his Swiss schoolteachers for not forcing him to switch. He returned to the office only three months after the incident and began traveling again by June of 2005. His family and friends worried about him at first. “It drove me crazy,” says the usually imperturbable Sandra. Roger Pullin recalls, “That summer, I saw Daniel at a conference in the Netherlands. During his presentation, he fell off the stage, but I just thought it was because of his natural enthusiasm.” Jay Maclean received his convalescent friend at his home on the Philippine coast: “He insisted on going snorkeling. It started alright, but he just could not get back. He nearly drowned me while I was helping him back to shore.”
In the end, though, everyone I spoke to agreed on one point: a new Daniel was born in 2005, a more sensitive one, a better listener—even if his relentless dedication to his work remained unaffected. For his part, Daniel takes a rational approach: “When you have a stroke, it changes the way your brain works and affects your hormones, lowering the threshold for emotiveness. You laugh and cry more easily. What really gets to me now are stories about altruism—I even tear up reading the newspaper now because I’m so overwhelmed by emotion.” Daniel was condemned to a lifetime aspirin regimen, but it’s a small price to pay—he hasn’t had another stroke since. And most importantly, Daniel’s stroke allowed Sandra to get her husband back. The spouses had been living separate lives for too long. Daniel finally let his guard down and admitted how much he owes to his wife of thirty years—he is nothing without her. And Sandra, who retired soon after, has been more involved in her husband’s daily life, often going with him on trips and keeping an eye on his workload: “Daniel doesn’t know how to say ‘no’ and a lot of people take advantage of him,” she says.
Daniel had (almost) worked himself to death: running the media gauntlet, exposing himself to criticism from the pro-fishing lobby, and receiving threatening and insulting letters from fishers on the East Coast of the United States, among other ordeals. I wonder to what extent these pressures affected his health. When talking to journalists, Daniel has always claimed that criticism doesn’t affect him, but in private, he admits that all the attacks and small betrayals often got under his skin.
His “friendly competition,” Boris Worm, who courageously withstood the media attention of the early 2000s, also spoke to me about that time. Boris, at the head of a team of thirteen other scientists, published a study in Science on November 3, 2006, that made a great deal of noise. The paper analyzed the impact of the loss of marine biodiversity on ecosystem services. They found, unsurprisingly, that the state of marine biodiversity was not a happy one, but that at this stage, things could still be turned around: with a little effort and a strong political will, marine ecosystems could be restored and food security ensured for all. Boris wanted to adopt a more conciliatory and less apocalyptic stance than the older generation of scientists like Daniel or his friend Jeremy Jackson, who studies historical overfishing. Buried among the conclusions of Boris and his team, though, was a serious warning: if nothing is done, the world’s exploited fish stocks will all disappear by 2048. The article was a hit with the media thanks to a press campaign organized by the formidable Nancy Baron, who worked simultaneously for Daniel and the Halifax team, but also because of how Science pitched the article. “They put the disappearance of exploited fish populations by 2048 in the forefront,” sighs Boris, “and the media focused on that a lot more than we would have liked.”
His colleagues and the fishing sector called Boris all sorts of names, accusing him of “talking nonsense” and undermining the hard work of fisheries specialists who are managing stocks as well as they possibly can. Soon, though, Boris had bigger things to worry about. A few weeks after the article appeared in Science, Ransom Myers was hospitalized with an inoperable brain tumor. He died five weeks later, leaving behind his wife and five children. “Heike [Lotze, Boris’s partner at the time] and I found ourselves alone, trying to run the research empire that Ransom had built in Halifax—I had only been on the job for eighteen months and it was just too much.” Boris fell ill with cancer the following year, but his sunny personality and an abundant pharmacopeia saved his life: “I happened to have a great medical team that I trusted completely.” He survived and went on publishing high-level scientific articles with insulting frequency. He remained a media darling, and he and Heike Lotze were crowned the most glamorous couple in marine ecology.6
When I ask about the dark years following Ransom Myers’s death and the pressure that Daniel and other whistleblowers were under, Boris answers simply, “Stress is obviously an aggravating factor for all kinds of pathologies, including cancer—it’s been proven scientifically, right?”
Daniel had a close call, but his stroke barely impacted his career. Indeed, starting in the early 2000s, the honors just kept flooding in, making him the most decorated marine biologist in the history of the discipline. The shower of awards proved particularly heavy in the United States, where Scientific American named the abandoned son of Winston McLemore as one of the most influential scientists on the planet. In 2003, he joined the Canadian Academy of Sciences. His native France was a little behind the times, but Daniel, the former draft dodger, was awarded the Grand Prix of the Société française d’écologie in 2011 and the Légion d’honneur in 2017. The most unexpected accolade came from Japan. “In June of 2005, I was in France to evaluate the fisheries research center in Sète,” Daniel recalls, “and I received an email telling me that I’d won an insane amount of yen.” Daniel transferred the suspicious message to his spam folder, but then, thinking the better of it, did some research: he had in fact just won the International Cosmos Prize, awarded each year by a Japanese association for outstanding work promoting a harmonious existence between nature and mankind. Past laureates had included the iconoclastic atheist biologist Richard Dawkins and the writer and scientist Jared Diamond. A few years later, Japan honored Edward O. Wilson, the champion of sociobiology and biodiversity, then French anthropologist Philippe Descola, and finally, in 2017, the primatologist Jane Goodall. In light of Daniel’s unflattering comments about Japanese whalers and long-liners, such a distinction from one of the world’s fishing capitals came as quite a surprise. “I learned that Nancy Knowlton, who is a coral reef specialist, was on the selection committee, and I think she was probably the one who suggested me,” Daniel explains. “It was a courageous decision on the part of the jury, which was mostly Japanese.”
After the initial decision, though, a more “political” committee took charge: “They had sent letters to quite a few of my colleagues asking if I was the kind of person who would cause a problem, be too provocative, et cetera.” His nomination made it through the red tape—no one knows how—and they sent him the good news. “That day in Sète, Daniel took us all out to a restaurant to celebrate,” remembers Philippe Cury, director of the fisheries research center at the time. “An FAO representative was also there, and he was just green with jealousy!”
“But that’s not all,” Daniel adds with a laugh. “The Cosmos Prize was conditional—I had to pass a sort of test to make sure I was presentable, unlike the Nobel Prize, which you get even if you’re a known racist or a misogynist!”* Two exquisitely polite Japanese men met with Daniel when he returned to Vancouver. “They asked a lot of questions and talked to my colleagues as well. We went out and ate a lot of good food, and it turned out fine in the end,” Daniel concludes.
Their neighborhood survey a success, the Cosmos committee began preparing for Daniel and Sandra’s weeklong visit to Japan. They requested photos and other documents for a booklet designed to tell the story of the candidate’s illustrious career. The Paulys aren’t big photographers, but Sandra managed to gather a few snapshots that told the story of her husband’s journey from La Chaux-de-Fonds to Vancouver. The album opens with a black-and-white photo of Daniel, not unlike a Studio Harcourt movie-star portrait, but with lower light. A block of text in Japanese on the facing page recounts his heroic story. The Japanese text is accurate, but, thanks to a small translation error, the English version takes a more adventurous turn: “Dr. Pauly was then in effect kidnapped in his infancy by a family in the French-speaking part of Swaziland.” Daniel finally got the African childhood he’d always dreamed of!
On a more serious note, the document also provides a summary of his scientific work, highlighting the fact that he had published over five hundred scientific articles and thirty books to date. As well, it contains a transcript of Daniel’s speech from the award ceremony. He carefully avoids the subject of Japanese fisheries, but does insist in his introduction that, though there has been a lot of talk about pollution in the oceans (notably thanks to Rachel Carson and Jacques-Yves Cousteau), fisheries have not received the same attention. He then lays into those who still believe that climate change alone is responsible for the disappearance of terrestrial and now marine megafauna. Daniel goes on to discuss his work, mocking the French fisheries scientists who have blamed “changes in species distribution” for the disappearance of fish stocks. Photos from the event show him, gray-haired and radiant, with the Cosmos medal around his neck on a rainbow-colored ribbon that reminds me of Bob Marley’s signature scarf.
“We had a great week,” Daniel confirms, “and I hope it helped, even just a little, to bring the problem of marine resource management to the attention of the public in Japan.” Listing their activities, Daniel recalls, “I did three conferences, one in Tokyo, one in Kyoto, and one in Osaka. Then Sandra and I met the prince and his wife at the imperial palace. On the way out, the journalists didn’t care about us. They were there to collect gossip about the royal couple, but of course we didn’t say anything. Everywhere we went, we were treated like royalty. The one exception was at the Ministry of Fisheries, where I was received by some underling in a dusty office, and there was no exchange of gifts—it was their way of showing their disgust.”
With the 400,000 dollars in prize money, Daniel finally paid off the couple’s home—the upper floor of a townhouse with bottle-green trim set on a tidy, peaceful street on the UBC campus. Their next-door neighbors are none other than Carl Walters and Villy Christensen. With the leftover funds, Daniel created a scholarship to support students from developing countries who want to work in their country of origin. “I’d like to point out,” Daniel insists, “that it’s the only scholarship awarded by UBC that isn’t named after its donor—it’s also called the Cosmos Prize.”
“Ah . . . everything was going right at UBC during that time,” he sighs nostalgically. “I was the university president’s favorite person.” This state of grace made it possible for Villy Christensen, his longtime research partner, to gather funds for a marine ecology event focusing on Daniel Pauly. Besides, on May 2, 2006, the maestro would be celebrating his sixtieth birthday, and to mark the occasion—and because they’d nearly lost him a year earlier—Villy invited many of the people who had played an important role in Daniel’s career. Each participant presented a piece of the scientific puzzle that constituted Pauly’s global vision of the world’s oceans, and their conference papers later went into a collective work edited by Villy and Jay.7 Many of Daniel’s old colleagues answered the call, and he was moved to tears by the sight of his former mentor, Gotthilf Hempel, accompanied by Cornelia Nauen, his Filipino friends Annadel Cabanban and José Ingles, and many, many more, all of whom had come to Vancouver to be part of his birthday celebration. From a more scientific standpoint, the event allowed his team to highlight the importance of “ecosystem approaches to fisheries.” Behind the dry title is a very simple concept: in order for exploited fish stocks to be healthy, the ecosystems they live in need to be healthy, too.
* Literally, “Do not exit while train is in motion.” A figurative expression in German that means “Don’t leave before the party’s over” or “Don’t leave without saying goodbye.”
* Daniel is referring to James Dewey Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962 alongside Francis Crick for discovering the double helix structure of DNA—a discovery that was in fact based in large part on the work of a female scientist, Rosalind Franklin.