Roger Payne

Roger Searle Payne (January 29, 1935 – June 10, 2023) was an American biologist and environmentalist famous for his 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. Early life Payne was born on January 29, 1935, in Manhattan, New York City, to Elizabeth (née Searle) and Edward Benedict Payne. His mother was a music teacher and his father an electrical engineer. Payne graduated from Horace Mann School in 1952. He later received his BA degree at Harvard University and his Ph.D. at Cornell University. Career Payne 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. He and fellow researcher Scott McVay in 1967 discovered the complex sonic arrangements performed by male humpback whales during the breeding season. The specific discovery was made during a research trip to Bermuda with a naval engineer who was documenting underwater sounds while listening for the sounds of Russian submarines. 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.