Roger Payne

Who is Roger Payne?

Roger Searle Payne is a biologist and environmentalist famous for the 1967 discovery of whale song among humpback whales. Payne later became an important figure in the worldwide campaign to end commercial whaling.

Payne studied at Harvard University and Cornell. He spent the early years of his career studying echolocation in bats and auditory localization in owls. 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 whales and blue whales can communicate with sound across whole oceans.