An empathetic biography of Daniel Pauly tells the story of a scientist committed to the study and protection of the oceans. Daniel Pauly and I met on the second day of my marine studies in Kiel, back in late 1969 and we’ve been friends ever since. Little did I know then about his dramatic, novelistic life up to that point: He had been ‘kidnapped’ by a Swiss family from his single working mother in Paris after the Second World War and later kept by them as a domestique (servant). Some of the details I only discovered when reading David Grémillet’s brilliant new book on Daniel’s life, translated from French to English by Georgia Lyon Froman.