Customer Reviews

On the Sex of Fish and the Gender of Scientists: A collection of essays in fisheries science (Fish & Fisheries Series)

By Daniel Pauly. 1994
London: Chapman & Hall. Fish and Fisheries Series 14.
ISBN 0 412 595400

Is Daniel Pauly the Steven Jay Gould of the fisheries world, as claimed by his colleague Tony Pitcher? On the evidence of this slim volume of clippings, gleaned mostly from ICLARM journals, the answer must be no. Nevertheless, despite the lack of coherence in these miscellaneous musings, there is certainly food for thought, and considerable promise that Daniel Pauly may yet mature into the Steven Jay Gould (or even the Germaine Greer) of the fisheries world.

Those who know him are aware that Pauly is not a man to mince words, particularly when dealing with other human beings, and the occasionally scathing reviews and criticisms contained in this book can be highly entertaining. Those who know him are also aware that Daniel is not a man of underweening ego. Who else but Daniel Pauly would write articles about the frequency of his reprint requests and citations? And who else but Daniel Pauly would complain that people don't publish enough of their original raw data (Essay 26: "Data-rich books") for him to use in his own work (Essay 19: "On using other people's data").

However, there is no room for modesty if you are going to change the world, and there is no denying that Pauly is a juggernaut when it comes to promoting concepts. He is the master of the eye-catching phrase, which is almost as beneficial to one's citation count as authoring new methodology. How many times did you see the phrase "Malthusian overfishing (Pauly 1994)" a few years ago? His promotion of length-based stock assessment methods using ELEFAN was legendary, although it is a pity that the limitations of ELEFAN were not as heavily promoted in the beginning, particularly its simplistic method of identifying histogram peaks through running-average subtraction, and lack of any way of assessing the statistical significance of results. But hell, these are just the teething troubles that any new technology suffers, and Bill Gates had no compunction in releasing the bug-ridden first release of Windows 3.0 on the unsuspecting public.

Pauly seems to feel that confidence in one's results is a matter more of personality than statistics. In Essay 2: "Concepts that work", he berates John Gulland for having warned scientists in the tropics about using estimates for mortality that have no confidence intervals around them, simply because some temperate fishery stock assessments have also used similar "unconfident" estimates. In this essay, Pauly seems to have great confidence that the length-based estimation of mortality is now an exact science, but paradoxically feels that it is almost impossible to get a handle on recruitment. Both processes are of course equally well (or poorly) described by looking at opposite ends of the length-frequency histogram.