Ocean Alliance
| Motto | Protecting whales and their environment through research and education |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1971 |
| Founder | Roger Payne |
| Type | 501(c) organization |
| Headquarters | Gloucester, Massachusetts |
| Location |
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Key people
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Founder and President Dr. Roger Payne, Chief Executive Officer Dr. Iain Kerr, Dr. Victoria Rowntree |
| Website | http://whale.org |
Ocean Alliance, Inc., a 501(c)3 organization, is dedicated to the conservation of whales and their marine environment through research and education. The organization is based in the iconic Tarr & Wonson Paint Manufactory in Gloucester, Massachusetts, United States.
It was founded in 1971 by biologist Roger Payne. Led by Payne and Chief Executive Officer Iain Kerr, Ocean Alliance collects a broad spectrum of data on whales and ocean life relating particularly to toxicology, behavior, bioacoustics, and genetics. From those data, the alliance works with its scientific partners to advise educators and policy makers on wise stewardship of the oceans in order to: reduce pollution, prevent the collapse of marine mammal populations, maintain human access to fish and other sea life, and benefit ocean and human health.
Ocean Alliance was founded in 1971 by whale biologist Dr. Roger Payne, with the purpose of saving the great whales from the very real extinction risk which commercial whaling posed at the time. Payne, along with colleague Scott McVay, became famous for the discovery that humpback whales sing songs, a discovery which allowed him to become an influential figure in the worldwide campaign to end commercial whaling.
Since its founding under Payne, and later under the stewardship of current CEO Dr. Iain Kerr, Ocean Alliance has been an important group in the worldwide effort to research and protect great whales. They are well-respected for developing benign research techniques, and in the process proving that far more can be learnt from a live whale than from a dead one. Many of their exploits have brought them closely into the public eye, leading Payne to describe the group as "the group you don’t know you know". During the 1990s, Payne established that the way to save whales would be to show them to the world, and Ocean Alliance became involved in over forty documentaries including In the Company of Whales and the IMAX film WHALES. In 1979 Roger Payne proclaimed that pollution would replace the harpoon as the greatest threat to whales, and in more recent years much of Ocean Alliance’s work has been directed towards combating this growing threat. From 2000-2005, under the leadership of Iain Kerr, Ocean Alliance launched the Voyage of the Odyssey, which provided the first ever global data set on pollution in the oceans. This project lasted five years and spanned the entire planet. In the executive summary of the program, Roger Payne states that, "The Voyage of the Odyssey has proven irrefutably that ocean life is becoming polluted to unacceptable levels by metals and human-made contaminants".
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