Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Daniel Pauly

2017; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.002

1879-0445

Daniel Pauly,

Marine and fisheries research

Daniel Pauly is University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia and the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us (http://www.seaaroundus.org). He was born in Paris, raised in Switzerland, studied at Kiel University in Germany and earned a Master’s degree based on fieldwork in Ghana, a doctorate inspired by his fieldwork in Indonesia and an ‘Habilitation’ based on work conducted in the Philippines and elsewhere. His contributions to fisheries science and marine conservation include FishBase, the online encyclopedia of fishes, the documentation of marine ecological processes such as ‘fishing down marine food webs’, and concepts such as ‘shifting baselines’, which have earned him numerous awards worldwide. You grew up in a land-locked country, why did you study marine sciences? My reasons were practical: I wanted to study an applied discipline so that I could work and contribute to a — yet unidentified — developing country, to which I would eventually emigrate. To a biracial person — that’s me! — Europe, in the 1970s, was as unwelcoming as it is now, and I wanted to get out. I began studying agronomy at Kiel University in Germany, because agriculture is important in developing countries, but after one semester of daily confrontations with old Nazis — they were still around in 1969 — I found refuge in the Institute of Marine Sciences. Strangely enough, my weird emigration plan worked eventually and I did spend a large part of my adult life working in tropical developing countries, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. What did you contribute to these countries? At the risk of sounding grandiose, I think that I was able to contribute to the empowerment of fisheries scientists in many tropical developing countries. I did this mainly by adapting the approaches and software devised for studying fisheries in cold-water countries, where exploited fish species are few and where the age of individual fish can be readily estimated, for use in the tropics, where a multitude of species are exploited whose age and thus growth could not be estimated. I was lucky in that I began this work just as programmable calculators, and later, personal computers became widely available. In the 1980s and 1990s, I taught these new approaches and the use of the software implementing them at numerous courses for government and other fisheries scientists, many sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and Latin America. Many of these methods are still used, which is very gratifying. Another line of work started when I realized that distributing bibliographies — then the standard approach for disseminating scientific information to researchers in developing countries, which often lacked effective national library systems — was about as useful as distributing cookbooks to alleviate a famine. The point was to distribute the information itself, which I did with colleagues, such as Rainer Froese and ‘Deng’ Palomares, by creating a database for all fish species of the world that contains the key biological traits (on growth, reproduction, food and feeding habits, distribution, etc.) extracted from thousands of scientific papers. The result was FishBase (www.fishbase.org) and later SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org for marine animals other than fishes). These databases now enjoy about 50 million page views throughout the world in spite of the fact that Wikipedia and Google Scholar have encroached into an area that was previously occupied by us alone. Incidentally, as is the case for Wikipedia, we are experiencing difficulties in maintaining FishBase and SeaLifeBase as free information sources. In our age, maintaining a public good is difficult. So, have you accomplished what you set out to do? Looking back, I am rather happy that I have been able to realize much of what I intended to do when I started my professional life. But, in truth, the gap between fisheries research and management, while now perhaps narrower than when I started, is still huge. We still massively overfish marine resources. This is frustrating, because we now know what should be done to put fisheries on a sustainable path. One of the things we do know is that establishing marine reserves is a sine qua non of marine conservation. Marine conservation is necessary for fisheries management because the industrial sector, left to its own devices, will capture the agencies that are supposed to regulate it, and then destroy the resources upon which it depends. I think, however, I have been effective in communicating this dynamic to a wide audience — though of course there are also flat-earthers in fisheries science — but again, it was easy, given the excesses of industrial fishing and its geographic expansion since the second world war. This expansion was largely driven by successive collapses in traditional fishing grounds, and hence the need for new fishing grounds. We are now even pumping krill around Antarctica to feed farmed salmon. Why did you move to Canada? I came to Canada for a very down-to-Earth reason: the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM), which had enabled me to work in many countries from a base in the Philippines, suffered a governance crisis at the hand of inept leaders. When in 1994 it became clear that ICLARM would cease being the research powerhouse that it was, I accepted a position at the University of British Columbia’s newly founded Fisheries Centre (now: Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries), with the expectation that I would contribute to UBC’s international outreach. I did this by founding the Sea Around Us. What is the Sea Around Us? Named after the book by Rachel Carson, one of my heroes (the other is Charles Darwin, to whom I devoted a book, ‘Darwin’s fishes’), the Sea Around Us is a research project I was able to launch in mid-1999 with the help of a generous grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, and which is now funded by a variety of philanthropic foundations. Its mission, as for FishBase in the case of fishes, is to make key information on marine fisheries available to researchers globally (i.e., for all maritime countries, including the remotest small island states) so that empowered colleagues can perform their jobs better, providing fisheries management advice based on accurate data in a timely fashion. The single most important information about fisheries is their catch. Thus, we first undertook to make available through graphs and maps the catch statistics that member countries submit annually to the FAO, and which were available only in tabular format. However, a close examination of these graphs and maps revealed that these official catch data had issues that were not realized before, and we undertook a giant project to correct them, for all maritime countries, from the ground up. With the help of hundreds of colleagues throughout the world, notably many of the participants of various courses I had previously taught across five continents, this 12-year project is now completed (www.seaaroundus.org). However, the ‘reconstructed’ catch data that this project yielded are globally around 50% higher than official data and have sharply declined since 1996. These data will need to be updated regularly so that the various catch-derived indicators of the status of fisheries worldwide, and their impact on marine ecosystems, remain current. It seems everything worked. What didn’t? There is one concept that I have had difficulty getting across: my explanation of why fish grow the way they do. They tend to grow during their entire lives, but their maximum size and the size at which they first mature are dependent on temperature and dissolved oxygen in a predictable fashion; they migrate such that they remain in the same temperature envelope, their food conversion efficiency declines with size, etc. In Indonesia, in the mid-1970s, I had identified the growth of fish as the key unknown in the management of tropical fish, and worked on this topic for my doctorate. The hypothesis I proposed has since been corroborated multiple times. Simply put, fish grow as much as the surface of their gills allows, which explains, among other things, why tuna grow fast, but rockfish grow slowly. However, the idea never got much traction with colleagues. But then, global warming came along, with warmer waters doing to marine and freshwater fishes (and to aquatic invertebrates) all the things that are corollaries of the hypothesis that gill surface area is limiting growth and other processes in fish. Thus, temperature increases impact large fish more than small individuals of the same species, because they have a relatively smaller gill surface area per unit of body weight; they remain smaller — because the size at which O2 supply just meets tissue demand is reached at smaller size — and they mature at smaller sizes —because the metabolic level triggering maturation is reached at a lower threshold. Except for the above hypothesis, there is no single explanation for these patterns and several other related phenomena, and thus these ideas are gradually, and perhaps grudgingly, getting more attention than before. This would be nice if the context were not so awful, namely that we are describing the beginning of the unraveling of oceanic life. So, as far as the future of the oceans is concerned, are you a pessimist or an optimist? Frankly, I hate to be asked that, because there never is time, at the end of public lectures or an interview, to explain that — in a very profound way — it doesn’t matter what a person feels about the future. I do what I have to do for ocean conservation, irrespective of whether or not the ocean will ‘die’ a hundred years from now. Every generation has its challenge. My parents’ generation had to deal with an attempt to abolish enlightenment values, and return to barbarism (the Nazis, again). This challenge had to be met, irrespective of whether a win was assured. Similarly, this generation — and yours, dear reader! — will have to confront the threats posed by global warming, species extinctions and our overpopulation. These must be confronted, if only to limit the damage. We have no choice, and the question is thus meaningless.