Roger Searle Payne was born on January 29,1935 and is an American biologist and environmentalist famous for the 1967 discovery of whale song among humpback whales.
12 Facts About Roger Payne
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Roger Payne was born in New York, New York, and received his BA degree at Harvard University and his Ph.
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Roger Payne spent the early years of his career studying echolocation in bats and auditory localization in owls.
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Roger 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.
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Roger Payne has led many expeditions on the world's oceans studying whales, their migrations, cultures and vocalizations.
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Roger Payne was the first to suggest fin whales and blue whales can communicate with sound across whole oceans, a theory since confirmed.
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Some of Roger 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.
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In 1975 a second LP was released, and in 1987 Roger Payne collaborated with musician Paul Winter putting whalesong to human music.
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In 1971, Roger Payne founded Ocean Alliance, a 5013 organization working with whale and ocean conservation.
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Roger Payne was an assistant professor of biology at Rockefeller University and, concurrently, a research zoologist at the Institute for Research in Animal Behavior, run by Rockefeller University and the Wildlife Conservation Society, then known as the New York Zoological Society.
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IRAB was succeeded by the Wildlife Conservation Society's Center for Field Biology and Conservation in 1972, and Roger Payne continued as a Wildlife Conservation Society research zoologist and Scientific Director of the Society's Whale Fund until 1983.
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From 1960 to 1985 Roger Payne was married to noted elephant researcher Katharine Payne, who performed similar research on the vocalizations of elephants and humpbacks.