THE SEA AROUND US had taken on planetary proportions. Daniel and his team had proven themselves with their work on North Atlantic marine ecosystems and by exposing the Chinese administration’s faulty statistics. The Pew Charitable Trusts rewarded them with funding that would make it possible to expand their analysis to cover all of Earth’s oceans. Under Villy Christensen’s supervision, they generated Ecopath-type models for all sixty-four of the world’s marine regions. But, in accordance with the ecosystem approach to fisheries, they didn’t limit their analyses to exploited fish species and their environments: they also included marine megafauna, the large animals that inhabit aquatic environments.
In the late 1990s, Daniel and his UBC colleague Andrew Trites began tracking down studies on marine mammals in order to accomplish just that. These creatures, after being harpooned to near extinction, are still regularly blamed for competing with fisheries. They recruited the German researcher Kristin Kaschner, with whom Daniel enjoyed many an intellectual sparring session in his second language while she worked on mapping the global distribution of 115 (of the 120 known) species of marine mammals and calculating their resource consumption.1 The results: all the whales, dolphins, and seals in the world do indeed consume more seafood than all the humans, but the differences between human and animal diets are such that they rarely compete for resources, and when they do, it is mainly in the polar regions, especially the northern hemisphere. Those regions in which marine mammals and fisheries coexist only provide about 15 percent of the world’s catch, however, and just 1 percent of the animals’ diet. These figures are vitally important when it comes to confronting fisheries managers in certain countries, who have suggested simply killing off the remaining populations of marine mammals in order to “improve fishery yields.” 2
In the same vein, Daniel and Reg Watson codirected the PhD thesis of a young researcher named Vasiliki Karpouzi, who left her native Greece for cloudy Vancouver to calculate the nutritional requirements of the world’s seabirds. After an absolutely tremendous amount of bibliographic research, Vasiliki was able to show that, in all, the 350 or so known species of marine birds consume a slightly smaller proportion of the ocean’s resources than do fisheries. And like marine mammals, they mostly feed on organisms with no commercial value. However, she did identify a few areas where competition between seabirds and fishers is strong, namely the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.3
BUT THE FISHING statistics on which these comparisons depended were false, and Daniel knew it. The data sent to the FAO by UN member states included, at best, catch volumes from industrial fishing, but never the total volume fished, which he knew had to be much higher because of bycatch, undeclared catches, and artisanal and sport fishing. So, Daniel threw his team into their biggest project yet: reconstructing those statistics to get figures that more closely resembled reality.
The process is incredibly simple, explains Dirk Zeller, who coordinated data reconstruction for 273 countries and overseas territories. First, they gathered FAO and other “official” statistics from 1950 to 2010, then examined them for potential problems. From there, the Sea Around Us team, with its dozen PhD students each paired with at least one local expert, began gathering nonofficial data to fill in the gaps. “The key part of the methodology proposed here is psychological,” Daniel wrote. “One must overcome the notion that ‘no information is available’ . . . Rather, one must realize that fisheries are social activities, bound to throw shadows onto the societies in which they are conducted.”4
Such shadows were precisely what the Sea Around Us team hoped to find by studying publications, technical reports, port authority records, and so on, in a multitude of local languages—sources that international researchers had generally failed to take into account. The Sea Around Us team could read in thirteen languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, and Russian, and Daniel recruited research assistants who understood the required languages to deal with the rest. “The rarer the language, the more Daniel enjoys decoding the text,” they tell me in the hallway at UBC. The Vancouver-based researchers also drew heavily on British and French colonial archives and hunted down all the information they could find on the internet: newspaper articles, satellite images of fishing installations, even photos of trophy catches. This allowed them to go beyond the official statistics and reestimate the number of active fishing boats, their catch volume per species and per day at sea, and, ultimately, the total catch volume year by year for each country. This incredibly time-consuming, repetitive, and onerous work was carried out for every country and territory on the planet that had any coastline whatsoever. Even the Gaza Strip was included. The 325 local experts made enormous contributions, some of them over several years. Daniel’s reputation helped generate interest in the project: some candidates had already crossed his path during his thirty years of world travel, while others jumped at the chance to work with the famous Professor Pauly.
The result: a huge chart covering all the fisheries in the world from 1950 to the present, a historic and geographic picture of unprecedented proportions. Their data was not as precise as the biomass per species figures painstakingly tabulated by countries in the Global North. But, as Daniel points out, “We gain nothing from the notion that only a select group has the key to understanding fisheries, especially if that key cannot open any doors outside a small number of developed countries.”5 “Yet,” he continues, “it is only by making bold assumptions that we can obtain the historic catches needed for comparisons with recent catch estimates and thus infer major trends in fisheries.” 6
And these comparisons are informative indeed: although the FAO reported that catches had gone up over the decades to reach 86 million metric tons per year in 1996 and supposedly leveled off or declined only slightly from there, Pauly and his team showed that the “reconstructed catches” were actually one and a half times that. Additionally, though the “reconstructed catch” also reached its climax in 1996 at 130 million metric tons, it has been declining ever since then by a million metric tons per year on average. Most importantly, this drop is not the result of improved fishing regulations but of generalized resource depletion, with industrial fishers being responsible for three-quarters of the global catch. The authors also underline the fact that 10 percent of seafood caught each year is discarded, particularly as a result of shrimping, which is one of the worst offenders. Ten million metric tons of seafood, almost all of it perfectly edible, is pulled out of the oceans each year and wasted. In conclusion, the authors call on the United Nations to reinforce the agencies responsible for tracking fishing activities, adding that incomplete statistics also plague other domains. For example, although the FAO announced that deforestation had fallen by half in the first years after 2000 based on the reports of member states, satellite analysis showed that it had actually doubled.
The results were promising, but, once again, the work took its toll. When I saw him in Vancouver in 2015, Daniel and his coeditor Dirk Zeller were finishing their five-hundred-page Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries and an accompanying article that summarized the work.7 “We worked like crazy—I’m scared to death,” Daniel confessed, and he suddenly seemed older, worn out. He would often arrive at the lab unshaven and bent over by a terrible backache. Daniel knew that this would be his last big project, the result of a decade of hard labor—and also that he would probably be attacked and questioned mercilessly about the reconstructed catch statistics, which the leading lights of fisheries science would dismiss as far too esoteric.
But the study, published in spring of 2016, was a home run, and when I saw him again, Daniel looked ten years younger. Boris Worm and many others came out to support him, the media overflowed with praise, and their article was cited one hundred times in the first year after its publication. The following year, Dirk and Daniel won the Blue Marine Foundation’s Ocean Award for their work.