Roger Payne

 ( 1935 Births ) 

Payne described 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. He identified these sounds as whales singing to one another.

Payne's recordings were released in 1970 as an LP album 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.

Payne subsequently led many expeditions on the world's oceans studying whales, their migrations, cultures and vocalizations. Payne was also the first to suggest and can communicate with sound across whole oceans, a theory since confirmed. In 1975 a second LP was released, and in 1987 Payne collaborated with musician Paul Winter in combining whalesong with human music.

Whale recordings by Frank Watlington (with commentary by Payne) were released on a flexi disc soundsheet inside the January 1979 National Geographic magazine. This issue, at 10.5 million copies, became the largest single press run of any record at the time. In addition to whale recordings Payne also published books and worked with film crews on many television documentary productions and on the IMAX movie Whales: An Unforgettable Journey.

In 1971, Payne founded Ocean Alliance, a 501(c)(3) organization working for whale and ocean conservation, based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was also an assistant professor of biology at Rockefeller University and, concurrently, a research zoologist at the Institute for Research in Animal Behavior (IRAB), run by Rockefeller University and the Wildlife Conservation Society, then known as the New York Zoological Society. IRAB was succeeded by the Wildlife Conservation Society's Center for Field Biology and Conservation (CFBC) in 1972, and Payne continued as a Wildlife Conservation Society research zoologist and scientific director of the society's Whale Fund until 1983."Roger Searle Payne". Marquis Who's Who, 2008. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale, 2009. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC. Fee, via Fairfax County Public Library. Accessed April 9, 2009. Document Number: K2014856565. From 2020, Payne served as principal advisor to Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a TED Audacious Project and nonprofit, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative. As a member of Friends of Lolita, Inc. (aka Friends of Toki), a non–profit corporation, one of Payne's last involvements was in supporting the planned move of the captive orca Lolita from the Miami Seaquarium to a sanctuary in the Salish Sea.