Daniel Pauly

Daniel Pauly
University of British Columbia | UBC · Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries

Professor

About

971
Publications
544,675
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
99,799
Citations
Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (971)
Cover Page
Full-text available
Marine organisms face a multitude of changes due to natural processes and human-induced impacts that disrupt their life-history and phenology and cause structural changes in the communities they are a part of. Climate change leads to warming oceans, causing distribution shifts, habitat loss, and deoxygenation, while ocean acidification disrupts the...
Article
Marine fisheries are crucial to the economy, livelihood, food security and culture of coastal nations and communities, significantly contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A decade ago, T. J. Pitcher and W. W. L. Cheung highlighted the dichotomy in the perception of fisheries' status, concluding that long‐term sustainabil...
Article
Aquacultured carnivorous species consume most of the world’s fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO), which itself is primarily derived from small pelagic fish. This has raised concerns about the practice’s impact on wild fish stocks, ecosystems, and coastal communities that rely on these fish. The aquaculture industry claims a decreasing dependence on wild f...
Book
Full-text available
The fourth Franco-Canadian Congress on Aquatic Sciences was held in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon from October 6 to 9, 2024. As for the first three editions, the two co-organizers were Fabrice Teletchea and Daniel Pauly. The event’s godmother was Sophie Jalton and the scientific committee was made up of: Pascaline Caudal, Caroline Cecchetti, Axel Hacal...
Article
Full-text available
Many seafood products marketed as “sustainable” are not. More exacting sustainability standards are needed to respond to a fast-changing world and support United Nations SDGs. Future fisheries must operate on principles that minimise impacts on marine life, adapt to climate change and allow regeneration of depleted biodiversity, while supporting an...
Article
Current stock assessment models overestimate productivity and recovery trajectory
Article
Full-text available
This study presents new records of three Critically Endangered angel shark species (Family: Squatinidae) occurring in the Eastern Mediterranean—Smoothback Angelshark S. oculata Bonaye, 1840, Sawback Angelshark S. aculeata Cuvier, 1829, and Angelshark S. squatina (Linnaeus, 1758). The supporting data serves to highlight three potential Critical Ange...
Article
Full-text available
ABSTRACT: Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloe...
Article
Full-text available
Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 yr. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or underrep...
Article
Full-text available
Background Cellulitis is defined as a bacterial infection of the skin and subcutaneous tissue that can cause multiple complications, such as sepsis and necrotizing fasciitis. In extreme cases, it may lead to multiorgan failure and death. We sought to analyze the clinical factors that contribute to the development of complicated disease, including d...
Article
Full-text available
Hatching corresponds to the moment an individual leaves its egg envelope. Yet, hatching has scarcely aroused the interest of biologists, and the question posed here, ‘why do larvae hatch when they do?’ appears to have been rarely asked. In this proof-of-concept study, we tested the hypothesis that fish larvae hatch when a specific ratio between egg...
Article
Full-text available
The size—and hence the age—at first maturity is a very important feature of fish and other water-breathing ectotherms (WBE), as it determines, jointly with their subsequent growth, longevity, and fecundity, the reproductive output that their life-history attempts to optimize. Here, based on the fact that gill surface area (S) is related to their we...
Article
Full-text available
This article proposes a mechanism that triggers first maturation and spawning in coral reef (bony) fish, which allows for predicting their length at first maturity. Thus, mean lengths at first maturity (Lm) and the corresponding maximum lengths (Lmax) in 207 populations of 131 species of coral reef fish were assembled and used to test the hypothese...
Article
Full-text available
Two forms of gigantism are differentiated in fish, Brobdingnagian and Goliathan gigantism, the former applying to populations whose individuals are all larger than is typical for the taxon, the latter to single individuals within a population. While Brobdingnagian gigantism is largely explained by various ecological and evolutionary rules, Goliatha...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Cellulitis is defined as a bacterial infection of the skin and subcutaneous tissue that can cause multiple complications, such as sepsis and necrotizing fasciitis. In extreme cases, it may lead to multiorgan failure and death. We sought to analyze the clinical factors that contribute to the development of complicated disease, including d...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Marine and coastal ecosystems are complex, especially because of the connection between their many functional groups and the various habitats provided by subsystems. Method To describe the trophic interactions, energy flows, and spatial distribution of species in the ecosystem of Dongzhaigang Bay, in Hainan, China, 28 functional group...
Article
Full-text available
The conventional view of spawning in iteroparous bony fish, i.e., the “reproductive drain hypothesis,” is based on the observation that somatic growth (in length) slows down noticeably at approximately the time fish attain maturity, and hence the assumption is made that investment in gonadal development slows down growth. However, when this is tran...
Article
Full-text available
Despite its importance for our understanding of the ecology and evolution of past life, ontogenetic data on early diverging euarthropods is distinctly lacking, as reconstructing life histories of fossil animals is often challenging. Here we report the growth trajectory of frontal appendages of the apex predator Amplectobelua symbrachiata, one of th...
Data
Some comments on the suitability of stocks for analysis with CMSY++ It is important to realize that every method, when applied to unsuitable data, will fail to provide reasonable results. Thus, this document attempts to provide some insights into the applicability of the data-limited CMSY++ method, by taking a closer look at the features of some st...
Article
Full-text available
Following an introduction to the nature of fisheries catches and their information content, a new development of CMSY, a data-limited stock assessment method for fishes and invertebrates, is presented. This new version, CMSY++, overcomes several of the deficiencies of CMSY, which itself improved upon the “Catch-MSY” method published by S. Martell a...
Article
Full-text available
Following an introduction to the nature of fisheries catches and their information content, a new development of CMSY, a data-limited stock assessment method for fishes and invertebrates, is presented. This new version, CMSY++, overcomes several of the deficiencies of CMSY, which itself improved upon the “Catch-MSY” method published by S. Martell a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or under...
Article
Oceans are increasingly warming through climate change. Fish and invertebrate ectotherms respond to ocean warming through poleward and depth-related migrations, a consequence of which is disruption of fisheries catch compositions. Mean temperature of the catch (MTC) is an index of change in catch composition, from colder to warmer water species. MT...
Article
Fishing has been practiced in Egypt for several millennia in the Nile and various lakes, the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea. Here, the marine fisheries catch from the area corresponding to Egypt's current Exclusive Economic Zone in the Mediterranean were re-estimated for the shorter period from 1920 to 2019. This study covers reported and formerly...
Article
Full-text available
Historical fishing effort has resulted, in many parts of the ocean, in increasing catches of smaller, lower trophic level species once larger higher trophic level species have been depleted. Concurrently, changes in the geographic distribution of marine species have been observed as species track their thermal affinity in line with ocean warming. H...
Article
Full-text available
FishBase (www.fishbase.org) is a global, open access information system about fishes that contains published scientific data on topics such as physiology and behaviour, life-history characteristics, and species distributions. Since its creation in the late 1980s, FishBase has evolved into a highly dynamic and versatile tool for scientists and the p...
Article
Full-text available
Rising temperatures, drought, and oxygen depletion may be the greatest threats to aquatic animals in the twenty-first century. As a robust body of literature suggests, large-bodied fish are among the most vulnerable organisms in times of rapid climate change. While earlier studies showed an interspecific correlation between body size and sensitivit...
Article
Full-text available
The Socotra Archipelago (Yemen), a group of four islands off the north-eastern tip of Africa in the western Indian Ocean, has a population that relies heavily on small-scale fishing for livelihoods and food security. However, the reporting of fisheries catches by Yemen has consistently been incomplete, with artisanal (small-scale, commercial) catch...
Article
Full-text available
The well-established temperature-dependence of growth parameters and maximum sizes of fish and other water-breathing ectotherms (WBEs) form the basis for various “temperature-size rules” for fish and WBEs. Numerous adaptationist interpretations of these rules exist, but their biochemical basis is largely ignored. One fundamental, but frequently ove...
Article
The richness of common names of Brazilian marine fishes was studied based on a sample of 725 species, covering 67% of all marine fishes recorded in Brazil. The richness of names is considerable (mean = six common names per species) and is positively related to commercial importance and habitat type, with more names associated with exploited or reef...
Article
White et al. (Science 377, p. 834-839, 2022) propose that reproduction reduces the somatic growth of animals. This contradicts the common observations that non-reproducing adults are not larger than those that reproduced as well as the very example the authors provide of a fish that reproduces while its growth continues to accelerate, which is comm...
Article
Full-text available
The highly toxic orange-spotted toadfish Torquigener hypselogeneion (Bleeker 1852) [conspecific Torquigener flavimaculosus Hardy & Randall, 1983] is now a very common invasive fish in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its small size, well under 20 cm, may have concealed the danger it represents, and little is known about its biology or ecology. Here, the...
Article
Full-text available
Catches have remained relatively high in the Gulf of Thailand and the Bohai Sea, China, despite severe biomass declines (around 95%) evidenced by fishery-independent surveys. Such high production at very low stock sizes is not predicted by simple-surplus production theory, but can be explained by age-structured models that predict high recruitment...
Article
Full-text available
Key traits of functional biodiversity are examined for 31,134 species of fishes. These traits are maximum body weight, productivity, and trophic level. A new, simple framework is presented that shows the combined usage of these traits, in ordinal categories, for close to 90% of extant species of fishes. Most species are clustered tightly along an e...
Article
Gill surface area (S) and respiration (R) in juvenile and adult crustaceans scale with their body weight (W) such that S ∝ R ∝ Wd, with d ranging mostly between 0.6 and 0.9, but always <1, as in other water-breathing ectotherms (WBE). The growth of adult crustaceans therefore approaches an asymptote, whether or not seasonal growth oscillations are...
Article
Full-text available
Among fishery biologists and even ichthyologists, maturation and spawning of fish are viewed as processes that use “energy” that would otherwise be applied to somatic growth, which is supposed to explain why post-maturity growth in length tends to decline. This widespread conceptualization may be called the “reproductive drain hypothesis” (RDH). Ho...
Book
Full-text available
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (SPM), a small archipelago south-east of Newfoundland, is the last territory in North america under French jurisdiction. SPM consists of three main islands, Saint-Pierre, langlade, and Miquelon, jointly covering 242 km2, and surrounded by a small exclusive economic Zone (eeZ) of 12,400 km2. In earlier times, the reach of S...
Article
Full-text available
The recent rapid growth in aquaculture production reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization may have inadvertently generated what we denote here as aquaculture over-optimism. An extreme form of this is the notion that we need not worry about sustaining wild fish stocks because we can meet the global need through farming. Here...
Article
Full-text available
This account serves as the introduction to a Special Issue of the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes. It includes 18 contributions, 12 of which deal predominantly with warming, four explicitly with deoxygenation, one providing the framework, and one addressing how warming and deoxygenation—which all contributions view, implicitly or explicitly...
Article
Full-text available
The current conception of sustainable fisheries focuses on single "stocks" targeted by industrial fisheries to supply growing global markets, including those for fishmeal. Sustainable fisheries should be reimagined to minimize exploitation and prioritize artisanal and subsistence fishing that feeds people.
Article
Full-text available
The length–weight relationships (LWR) and other morphological traits for 6417 specimens in 74 fish species collected seasonally, from July 2020 to April 2021, in the mangrove of Dongzhaigang Bay, Hainan Province, China, are presented. This involved, for all species, a sample size, and minimum and maximum lengths; in addition, for most species, it i...
Article
Full-text available
This study used catch/effort (CPUE) and length-frequency (L/F) data to evaluate the status of 26 fish species in the mangroves of the Dongzhaigang National Reserve, Hainan Province, China, sampled in 2009 (16 species), 2014 (18 species) and 2020 (15 species) using CPUE and the length-based Bayesian biomass (LBB) method. The CPUE, both in number and...
Article
Full-text available
While numerous Marine Protected Areas (MPA) have been created in the last decades, their effectiveness must be assessed in the context of the country’s biodiversity conservation policies and must be verified by local observations. Currently, the observations of local stakeholders, such as those from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academics,...
Article
Rebuilding overexploited marine populations is an important step to achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 14-Life Below Water. Mitigating major human pressures is required to achieve rebuilding goals. Climate change is one such key pressure, impacting fish and invertebrate populations by changing their biomass and biogeography. H...
Article
Full-text available
A length–frequency sample ( n = 295) from a fossil population of the Ordovician trilobite Triarthrus eatoni Hall, 1838, assembled and analyzed by J. L. Cisne in 1973 is here reexamined using methods of length–frequency analysis commonly used in fishery science and marine biology. Theoretical considerations and the empirical data at hand suggest tha...
Article
Full-text available
To bridge physiological and evolutionary perspectives on size at maturity in fishes, the authors focus on the approximately invariant ratio between the estimated oxygen supply at size at maturity (Qm) relative to that at asymptotic size (Q∞) among species within a taxonomic group, and show how two important theories related to this phenomenon compl...
Article
Full-text available
Warming increases the metabolic rates of fishes and drives their oxygen demands above environmental oxygen supply, leading to declines in fish growth and smaller population sizes. Given the wide variability in species' sensitivity to changing temperature and oxygen levels, warming and oxygen limitation may be altering the composition of fish commun...
Article
Fishing provides the world with an important component of its food supply, but it also negatively impacts the biodiversity of marine and freshwater ecosystems, especially when industrial fishing is involved. To mitigate these impacts, civil society needs access to fisheries data (i.e., catches and catch-derived indicators of these impacts). Such da...
Article
In our original contribution, we used a new simple method (CMSY, Froese et al., 2017) and the time series of catches of Hutchings and Myers (1995) to analyse five centuries of cod catches in eastern Canada (Schijns et al., 2021). Holm et al. (2022) point out that there was actually an improved historical time series that we had overlooked. As we no...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change is altering the distribution and composition of marine fish populations globally, which presents substantial risks to the social and economic well-being of humanity. While deriving long-term climatic baselines is an essential step for detecting and attributing the magnitude of climate change and its impacts, these baselines tend to b...
Article
Full-text available
Migrations of large pelagic fishes across the Pacific are usually inferred from tagging or genetic studies. Even though these techniques have improved over time, they still fail to demonstrate large transoceanic migrations, usually proposing ‘routes’ that do not cycle seasonally. The current study uses the concept of ‘philopatry’ in 11 large pelagi...
Article
Full-text available
An assessment of the stock status and historical changes in abundance of Coilia mystus and C. nasus in the Yangtze River Estuary, China, was carried out based on field surveys conducted in 2019–2020 and published length-frequency (L/F) data from earlier periods. These two species’ current and past relative biomasses (B/BMSY) were estimated using a...
Article
Full-text available
The length–weight relationships (LWR) of the common seadragon Phyllopteryx taeniolatus (Lacepède, 1804) and the leafy seadragon Phycodurus eques (Günther, 1865), Syngnathidae, are presented in this paper, based on specimens raised in the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, La Jolla, California. Furthermore, we used the length at known age of 40 specimens of...
Article
Full-text available
The Eastern Mediterranean Sea is the most invaded sea on the planet, with 666 nonindigenous species now recorded in the region. However, not all of these become successful in their new environments. Success here is defined by wide geographical spread, increased abundances, and larger maximum sizes than their native range. The silver-cheeked toadfis...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past 4 decades there has been a growing concern for the conservation status of elasmobranchs (sharks and rays). In 2002, the first elasmobranch species were added to Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Less than 20 yr later, there were 39 species on Appendix II and 5 o...
Article
Full-text available
Global warming affects the phenology of the Earth’s flora and fauna, notably by advancing the date at which many plants and animals tend to reproduce. We use fish, where this reproductive acceleration is well-documented, to present a simple approach based on sine curves to predict, in spring spawning fish, the minimum number of days (Δdmin) that sp...
Article
Full-text available
The prevailing determinant of maturation in fishes is thought to be a redirection of energy from growth to reproduction. Instead, the Gill Oxygen Limitation Theory predicts that maturation, and thus reproduction, is induced when a fish reaches a critical ratio of oxygen supply to demand (Qm/Qmaint). The consistency of this critical ratio has been p...