Having to science the hell out of it‡

A first-person account of the scientific career of the fishery scientist Daniel Pauly is given, starting with his studies in Germany and his work on a coastal lagoon in Ghana in 1971, through his trawl fisheries surveys in Indonesia (1975–1976), his work at the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management in the Philippines (1979–mid-1990s), and his transition to the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. Emphasis is given to the widely used major products of his and his collaborators' work (ELEFAN, Ecopath and FishBase) and to the Sea Around Us, a 15-year research activity that he led, which culminated in a reconstruction of global marine fisheries catches from 1950 to 2010, and which discovered a strong decline in catches since the mid-1990s.