He grew up, however, in La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland in what was called a strange "Dickensian" childhood where he was forced to stay as a live-in servant to a new family.

At 16 he ran away and put himself through high school in Wuppertal, Germany after one year working with disabled people for a local church-run institution.

He did a master's degree at Kiel University at Gotthilf Hempel lab on "The ecology and fishery of a small West African lagoon".

[4] Pauly then spent two years conducting trawling surveys as a member of a German-Indonesian project aiming at introducing this relatively new gear.

Pauly completed his Ph.D. at Kiel University in Germany supervised by Hempel, in which he established strong relationships between the surface area of gills and the growth of fishes and aquatic (gill-breathing) invertebrates.

After his Ph.D., Pauly worked for 15 years at the International Center for Living and Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM), in Manila, Philippines.

Pauly helped to design, implement, and perfect methods using length-frequency data instead of the age of fish to estimate parameters of fisheries statistics such as growth and mortality.