Daniel Pauly – Vanishing Fish - Updated Aug 8, 2020

Daniel Pauly is the Nobel Prize level scientist from UBC who has done the Sea Around Us program/document/computer systems that put together global fish catches from 1950 to 2010. He has just had a new book out, that summarizes his stellar career and catch stats: Vanishing Fish – Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries.

This book moves rapidly over five decades and all over the world where he has lived and worked in the fishery stats world, particularly the tropics. He has somehow managed to live several lives in multiple places with his greatest achievement to put different scientific areas together that had little previous interaction, figure out computer models to track catches and execute them. He has done several different modelling systems over the years, the Sea Around Us being where you can enter his world: http://www.seaaroundus.org/. It has nifty graphics on its home page. Go take a look.

Other issues included his term ‘shifting baselines’, the tendency of each new generation, in his case, science people, to consider what came before them as the baseline, rather than go back to the beginning to see how much really has been lost. An example would be east coast cod over the centuries, as interestingly put together by Mark Kurlansky, in Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. The 500-year history is a cool read, which includes how black people ‘came’ to America, sugar plantations, and rum.

Shifting baselines means that each new generation has a faulty picture of where the fish resource was, and thus whatever solutions they have are wrong. 

Historically, fishing has had three major features: utilizing near shore waters and moving out until they drop into the abyss; developing different methods of fisheries to exploit deeper and deeper water, and the species found there; and moving into uglier species once the catch of what was wanted could no longer be caught, and further and further away from home port.

Along with this there were a whole range of problems with the stats, and putting the stats together: commercial fishing demersal trawling methods destroyed the ocean floor, or benthos; ignoring discards; ignoring artisanal and sport fisheries; and, vast over reported catch from China, which lead to higher and false estimates of fish abundance. Along with this are the distorting effects of subsidies for fleets, tropical countries that were decades behind in the science and governance structures of Europe and North America.

Additionally, fleets were developed with billion-dollar bank projects. They then moved all around the globe catching other people’s and global fish. EEZs means ‘exclusive economic zones’, meaning 200 miles offshore, in both Canada and the States, but now up to 270 nations. ‘Agreements’ which allowed distant fleets to plunder African, Ghana for instance, stocks lead to crashing numbers around the world. And fuel subsidies have distorted effort.

An example of how specific the coalesced global stats could be, Pauly’s project determined that Norway had destroyed the Jack Mackerel stocks off Chile, and on far Pacific, pelagic stocks of the same species. Here is the graph of that collapse:

The Sea Around Us determined that 19 of 20 global fish stocks of ‘reduction’ fisheries were collapsing, poorly managed, or both. It is the reason, after trashing them, fish farm companies now have to move to single cell algae, maggots, soybean and other materials to feed their carnivorous salmon.

Pauly points out that so-called ‘reduction’ fisheries destroyed distant stocks to make feed for agricultural species like cows, hogs, chickens, fish. Yes, even species that had never eaten a fish, have been stuffed with them, rather than catching these small, pelagics for third world humans. They are instead used to fatten up ‘meat’ for first world mouths, since only they can afford them.

The other kind of fisheries are for ‘direct human consumption’ and the sad commentary is that fully 25% of all global fish are for reduction fisheries. An additional 25% are discards, meaning unwanted fish that are killed while catching the intended target and are simply dumped overboard, rather than be required to be landed for human use. And more recently, ‘high grading’ which is the reprehensible turfing of dead target fish already caught, when the fishing boat comes in contact with larger members of the target species. Terrible.

Moving back to Pauly: the list of brought together subjects includes meshing ecology with biology, subjects that a non-specialist would think were always meshed, but not so. Pauly attended conferences around the world and worked in more places than all the rest of us put together. Perhaps his single best quality, is that he has a mind that can see what conceptual outcome is required, find a way to add together the various fields, including developing and meshing technical languages, rigorizing the data, holes and figuring out data that don’t exist.

Pauly is well connected with other scientists, which allows him to work with tons of distant people with good minds. The references number 702 and an alarming number bear his name. I say alarming because how come the rest of us haven’t done the same?... probably not a good thought train to move along the many miles. Or laziness, at least that has the shifting baseline of our sloth, as in the definition of a rationalization includes that it has to be made in our favour.

Pauly makes short forays into North American fisheries subjects, NOAA and DFO. He covers the Miller, Viral Signature work, so important to the Cohen Commission third session, which Cohen reconvened to cover disease. She showed that PRV, er, a Viral Signature affected up to 90% of Fraser sockeye, so badly that they failed to spawn, even if they made it back to their tributary. In other words: “The smoking gun.” The look on her face, when coaxed to say the words, is indelible in the mind.

Additionally, he went with Alexandra Morton to catch salmon fry in the Broughton Archipelago in shallow bays near shorelines. In 2001, for example, the escapement fell from, as I recall, 1,470,000 pink salmon to just exceeding 100,000, an absolute collapse. Pauly then, briefly mentions that he was alarmed to be in a meeting with DFO scientists, who, were trashing her personally saying she had ‘spiked’ the lice data.

Pauly also discusses ITQs, individual vessel quotas, TAC, total allowable catch, and how DFO uses those concepts and stats to divvy up potential catch among commercial, sport and First Nations. Anybody on the SFI, SFAB, WSAC, PSC and other technical committees would benefit from this book.

Vanishing Fish is clear, direct, succinct. It has an unmistakeable self authenticizing tone. Pauly comes across as a unique mind, with unique contacts, putting together unique minds and subject matters. It would be nice if there were many more of him. If would do humanity good. Read this book.

Vanishing Fish is from Greystone Books. Buy it here: https://www.amazon.ca/Vanishing-Fish-Shifting-Baselines-Fisheries/dp/1771643986/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Vanishing+Fish%2C+Pauly&qid=1561927154&s=gateway&sr=8-1. 

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Subsequent to this review, Pauly did a review of global fish for the Narwhal. See it here:  https://thenarwhal.ca/aquacalypse-now-end-fish/?fbclid=IwAR0iN3rOq_ZWFRw1jDb75SKJbLrfrNoowjqWqqsZihCjn-Rj0CEgpu7v2uI&utm_source=Watershed+Watch+Email+List&utm_campaign=25d15bea09-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_21_10_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_405944b1b5-25d15bea09-166907249&mc_cid=25d15bea09&mc_eid=5777c92bcd.

Here is a new, 2020 report on this subject- Until the Seas Run Dry: https://www.ciwf.org.uk/research/species-fish/until-the-seas-run-dry/?fbclid=IwAR11vhy5N1Vbx29HIpx83zXy_F9qd4Lx1fr-sCp_QV5pHNDQhd4l5d-NJTI.