Iconoclast Looks for Fish and Finds Disaster nytimes.com
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Most fisheries scientists work for regulatory agencies charged with managing a particular stock in a particular port, he said. But he and his colleagues "have given ourselves the mandate to look at the whole world."
"Nobody has been asking these questions before," Dr. Pauly said.
In the process, he and his fellow researchers are making a splash with paper after paper in the most prestigious scientific journals. Their news is uniformly bad. So Dr. Pauly has become a man on a mission to spread the word that fish stocks are plummeting around the world.
"In some places in the world," he said, "you can see people chasing the last fish. In the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen. That's where it stabilizes. These people cannot feed their families."
Unchecked, he says, the same will be seen around the world, and the fishing industry will leave little in the seas but harvests of what he calls "bait and worse," the bottom levels of the marine food web like sea cucumbers, jellyfish and, eventually, plankton for future generations to eat.
The problem, he and colleagues say, can be remedied only with a huge reduction in global fishing and the radical step of creating large "no take" zones, where fish can grow large, breed and replenish. But that will only happen, he said, if the true owner of the ocean resources, the public, demands it, which has yet to happen. The public should demand it, he said, once people know the truth about what overfishing really means.
"No, you don't need to worry about these problems," he said, "as long as your children like plankton stew." . . .
Most recently, Dr. Pauly helped create what may be the biggest and most lasting field-leveler of all, FishBase, online at www.fishbase.org (http://www.fishbase.org/search.html) , with information on every one of the 27,000 fish species, including photographs, home climate, depth, peril to humans and the person who named it. It gets as many as five million hits a month.
But giving the world access to information about fish is not enough for Dr. Pauly, who, critics and fans agree, has the gift of seeing the bigger picture.
Other groups are also putting together organism databases for the Web. Eventually, Dr. Pauly said, he envisions all the databases becoming linked so that a person can choose a location and instantly see all the organisms found there.
Grabbing off his bulletin board a cartoon of a command center that he said he envisioned as equivalent to the bridge on Star Trek's Enterprise, he explained that a person would navigate the ocean seeing the resident fish, raising a periscope to spot bird life, clicking on an icon to see legal constraints about fishing in the region or retrieve information about temperature, salinity or pollution.
"We would say, `Captain Kirk, what are the life forms?' " Dr. Pauly said, bubbling with excitement at the conceptual device, his ultimate field-leveler, the invention that would let people anywhere, regardless of race, country or wealth, find the biological information they want, free.
At the suggestion that such an achievement sounds impossible, Dr. Pauly smiled and said: "That's what people said about FishBase. That that's not how we do things, that it couldn't be done." |
