French mother and Black American father, kidnapped in infancy and raised as a live-in servant in a Swiss family; at 16, Daniel Pauly, ‘The Ocean’s Whistleblower’ escaped Germany and made a massive database covering 36,000+ fish species

A year after the Second World War, a child was born in Paris to a white French woman and a Black American GI. Tragically, his father abandoned the family before he was born, and his mother’s family rejected her and her mixed-race son. Before he was old enough to understand any of his misfortunes, the boy was kidnapped from his mother by a Swiss couple and brought to the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where he was raised as a ‘live-in servant.’

At the age of 17 (or, in some accounts, 16) he fled the 'bizarre Dickensian' childhood. Subsequently worked his way through high school in Germany and obtained his Ph.D. in fisheries biology from the University of Kiel in 1979. He is Daniel Pauly, now a world-famous marine biologist.

“Pauly left his ‘home’, taking a train to a small town in Germany where a Lutheran minister had arranged for him to work in a hospital as a nurse’s aid,” award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Bruce Knecht recounted in his 2006 piece on Pauly on the non-profit website Oceana.


One year later, in 1964, his misfortune found him again; this time it was the French army that tracked him down to ‘demand that he return to France to perform his compulsory military service,’ the article noted. The young man who started out seeing the mess left behind by WWII and his own miseries would spend the later years of his lengthy career traveling around Africa, Asia, and Southeast Asia before finally settling down in Canada studying fish and fisheries.


In time, he would become someone who created FishBase, a large database on fish, working on Sea Around Us project and developing methodologies that revolutionized the way scientists viewed global fisheries. His research would also give the world a vocabulary for something easy to miss, that how come nobody bats an eye when our damaged ocean becomes a new normal.

Daniel Pauly’s life with a Swiss family

Daniel Pauly was 2 when his “struggling young mother” sent him to stay temporarily with a Swiss family that had somehow befriended her. But, according to Pauly, the family refused to return him. In a 2003 interview with The New York Times, he said the Swiss family told him his mother had abandoned him and later sent threatening letters to her in France.

Pauly went to reveal that time that he spent the next 14 years with the family, surviving as a replacement for their son who had died while also being made to work as a “live-in servant.” And growing up as a half-Black child in an overwhelmingly white Swiss town made him more isolated, which pushed him towards books.

''If you think of having a family as being loved as a child, cared for,'' he told the publication in 2003, ''I did not experience that.''

Pauly’s trip to Ghana from Germany

Pauly, in his first international travel of 1971, went to Ghana from Germany for his master's thesis. Later on, he traveled all around the continents of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas to study various cultures and the exploitation of aquatic ecosystems by the people living beside them.

This experience proved to be very useful for his scientific career, especially when he started researching fisheries with little available data. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pauly worked in the Philippines at the International Center for Living Aquatic Resource Management (ICLARM).

Daniel Pauly wanted to count what was disappearing

In 1994, Pauly became a professor in the Fisheries Center of the University of British Columbia. Later, he also became the director of the institution from 2003 to 2008. After five years at the university, Pauly started the Sea Around Us project. This project, which has been featured in the 2023 Annual Review of Marine Science, strives hard to quantify the impact of humans on the fisheries and find solutions.

The initial funding for the project came mostly from the Pew Charitable Trusts and later, from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and others.


In 2016, Pauly and Dirk Zeller, a Professor of Marine Conservation, published research titled “Catch reconstruction reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining.” Their work, along with the Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries, represented the culmination of a decade of research by the Sea Around Us.

FishBase made fish information a global resource

Pauly was also a co-founder of FishBase, a global biodiversity information system on fin-fishes, which began with a goal of providing key information on the population dynamics of 200 major commercial fish species.

It eventually grew into one of the world's largest information systems on finfishes. As described on the organization’s webpage, FishBase now covers more than 36,700 fish species and draws on more than 68,500 references and more than 2,570 collaborators.

This huge database compiles fish data about taxonomy, biology, trophic ecology, life history and uses, as well as historical data that dates back to 250 years.

The open-access global information system features more than 333,200 common names and more than 66,300 photographs and gets more than 700,000 hits every month.

Researchers, policy-makers, fisheries managers, conservationists, teachers and students can access this database in real time for studies on fishes and their ecosystems. Pauly was also instrumental in developing Ecopath, another software model that is used by fish researchers.

When environmental damage becomes normal

One of Pauly’s most influential ideas is the “shifting baselines syndrome.” People tend to judge the condition of an ecosystem against what they remember or what they experienced when they first encountered it. By the time an ocean has become devoid of a significant amount of fish, the future generation will have grown up believing that such a condition is normal. Eventually, they may forget how the ecosystem used to look.

“If we humans liked the past too much, we wouldn’t be able to move forward. Our ability to forget intergenerationally is an adaptive trait that made us very successful as an invasive species,” he explained in 2021 while launching a book by David Grémillet on his life, The Ocean’s Whistleblower.

His warning about overfishing

Pauly often known for blowing the whistle on the global fishing industry, has also spoken candidly about the economic and political forces that can keep industrial fishing going. In a 2023 interview with the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, he said, "Overfishing is not a natural phenomenon. Overfishing is maintained by subsidies. The political power of industrial fishing in front of various governments is what enables them to continue, even though they do horrible damage to our world....”

His argument places overfishing in a larger human system, as per him fish populations do not always decline because people catch too many fish. Government policies, economic incentives, industrial fishing and the interests surrounding them can all influence how much pressure is placed on marine ecosystems.