Roger Payne
| Roger Searle Payne | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 29, 1935 New York City |
| Residence | |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | BA 1957; PhD 1961 |
| Alma mater | Harvard U., Cornell U. |
| Occupation | Zoologist, researcher, science administrator, conservationist |
| Employer | Ocean Alliance, President |
| Known for | Discovery of whale song amongst humpback whales |
| Home town | South Woodstock, Vermont |
| Height | 6 ft 2 in (188 cm) |
| Spouse(s) |
Katharine (Katy) Boynton (m. 1960; div. 1985) Lisa Harrow (m. 1991) |
| Children | 4 |
| Parent(s) | Edward Payne Elizabeth Payne |
Roger Searle Payne (born January 29, 1935) is an American biologist and environmentalist famous for the 1967 discovery (with Scott McVay) of whale song among humpback whales. Payne later became an important figure in the worldwide campaign to end commercial whaling.
Payne was born in New York, New York, and received his BA degree at Harvard University and his Ph.D. at Cornell. He spent the early years of his career studying echolocation in bats (and how their food, moths, avoid them) and auditory localization in owls. Desiring to work with something more directly linked to conservation he later focused his research on whales where, together with researcher Scott McVay, in 1967 they discovered the complex sonic arrangements performed by the male humpback whales during the breeding season.
Payne describes the whale songs as "exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound" with long repeated "themes", each song lasting up to 30 minutes and sung by an entire group of male humpbacks at once. The songs would be varied slightly between each breeding season, with a few new phrases added on and a few others dropped. Payne has led many expeditions on the world's oceans studying whales, their migrations, cultures and vocalizations.
Payne was also the first to suggest fin whales and blue whales can communicate with sound across whole oceans, a theory since confirmed.
Some of Payne's recordings were released in 1970 as an LP called Songs of the Humpback Whale (still the best-selling nature sound record of all time) which helped to gain momentum for the Save the Whales movement seeking to end commercial whaling, which at the time was pushing many species dangerously close to extinction. Commercial whaling was finally banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986.
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