Dr. Roger S. Payne

about

Roger Searle Payne (born January 29, 1935 in New York, New York, United States) is a 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 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 would also be the first to suggest fin whales and blue whales can communicate with sound across whole oceans. Some of Payne's recordings were released in 1970 as an LP called Songs of the Humpback Whale 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. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

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