18 Facts About Roger Payne

Roger Searle Payne was an American biologist and environmentalist famous for his 1967 discovery of whale song among humpback whales.

Roger Payne was born on January 29,1935, in Manhattan, New York City, to Elizabeth and Edward Benedict Roger Payne.

Roger Payne's mother was a music teacher and his father an electrical engineer.

Roger Payne later received his BA degree at Harvard University and his Ph.

Roger Payne spent the early years of his career studying echolocation in bats and auditory localization in owls.

Roger 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.

Roger Payne identified these sounds as whales singing to one another.

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.

Roger Payne subsequently led many expeditions on the world's oceans studying whales, their migrations, cultures and vocalizations.

Roger Payne was the first to suggest fin whales and blue whales can communicate with sound across whole oceans, a theory since confirmed.

In 1975 a second LP was released, and in 1987 Roger Payne collaborated with musician Paul Winter in combining whalesong with human music.

In 1971, Roger Payne founded Ocean Alliance, a 501 organization working for whale and ocean conservation, based in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

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.

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.

From 2020, Roger Payne served as principal advisor to Project CETI, a TED Audacious Project and nonprofit, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative.

From 1960 to 1985 Roger Payne was married to whale and elephant researcher Katharine Roger Payne, who performed similar research on the vocalizations of elephants and humpbacks.

Roger Payne died at his home in South Woodstock, Vermont from squamous-cell carcinoma on June 10,2023, at the age of 88.

Five days before his death, Roger Payne published an essay in Time calling for a new conservation movement.