2023-06-15 18:38:23
The American biologist Roger Searle Payne, famous for the discovery of whale song among humpback whales in 1967 with Scott McVay, is dead Saturday, June 10 at his home in South Woodstock, Vermont, at the age of 88. The cause of his death was metastatic squamous cell carcinoma, his wife Lisa Harrow told the “New York Times”, which published the news today.
After discovering that whales are serenading each other, Payne recorded their cacophonous repertoire of roars, screams, moans resulting in a successful album and to an outcry to ban commercial whaling. Payne has combined his compelling scientific research with the emotional power of music to spur one of the world’s most successful mammal conservation campaigns. He amplified the voice of the whales to help secure a US congressional crackdown on commercial whaling in the 1970s and a global moratorium in the 1980s. He also founded the Ocean Alliance, a research and development organization dedicated to whale conservation, as well as programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society and others that continue his pioneering work.
He was a professor of biology at Rockefeller University and, concurrently, a researcher of zoology at the Institute for Research in Animal Behavior, run by Rockefeller University and the New York Zoological Society.
Born in New York on January 29, 1935, Payne had a degree in biology from Harvard University and a doctorate in systematic and evolutionary zoology from Cornell University. After studying the behavior of bats and owls, he then devoted himself to research on whales: with zoologist Scott McVay in 1967 he discovered the complex sound compositions performed by male humpback whales during the breeding season with underwater microphones.
Payne describes whale songs as “buoyant, uninterrupted rivers of sound” with long-repeating “themes”: each song lasts up to 30 minutes and is sung by an entire group of male humpback whales at the same time. Payne has led numerous expeditions to the world’s oceans studying whales through their migrations.
Some of Payne’s recordings were released in 1970 as a record called “Songs of the Humpback Whale” which helped give exposure to the Save the Whales movement seeking to end commercial whaling (commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986). In 1975 Payne released a second record and in 1987 he collaborated with musician Paul Winter adding the song of whales into human music.
Frank Watlington’s whale recordings (with commentary by Roger Payne) were released on a Flexi-disc in National Geographic magazine in January 1979; this issue, with 10.5 million copies, became the largest single print circulation of all time. In addition to his whale recordings, Payne has also published books and worked with film crews on several television documentary productions. In 1971 Payne founded the Ocean Alliance, an organization working for the conservation of whales and oceans, of which he was a longtime director.
(by Paolo Martini)
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