Paul Kuykendall Dayton (born April 8, 1941 in Tucson, Arizona) is a biological oceanographer and marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
He has also documented the environmental impacts of overfishing, and phenomena such as El Niño on coastal ecology.
[citation needed] In 2002, he received the Scientific Diving Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Underwater Sciences; in 2004 he was honored with the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American Society of Naturalists, and in 2006 was the first recipient of the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology.
[2] Dayton has been director of The Ocean Conservancy and the National Research Council Panel on Marine Protected Areas.
He then earned a doctorate in zoology at the University of Washington under Robert T. Paine, known for the Keystone species concept.