Roger Payne

Roger Payne is a biologist and environmentalist made famous by (together with Scott McVay) in 1967 discovering Whale song among Humpback whales. Payne later became an important figure in the world-wide campaign to end commercial whaling.

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Payne was born in 1935 in New York and studied at Harvard University and Cornell. He spent the early years of his career studying the acoustics of bats, owls and moths (all of which use echolocation to navigate at night). Desiring to work with something more directly linked to conservation he later focused his research on whales where he together with researcher Scott McVay in 1967 were the first to discover 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 would also be the first to suggest Fin 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.

In addition to whale recordings Payne has also published books and worked with film crews on many television documentaries and the IMAX movie "Whales".

In 1971 Payne founded Ocean Alliance, a 501(c)3 organization working with whale and ocean conservation. He still heads the organization.

Payne has received a United Nations Environment Programme Global 500 Award and a MacArthur Fellowship among other awards for his research. He is a Knight in the Netherlands Order of the Golden Ark.