Roger Payne, biologist who heard whales sing, dies at 88

Roger S. Payne, a biologist whose discovery that whales serenade each other, led him to record their cacophonous repertoire of barks, booms, screeches, screams, lows and lows, resulting in both a hit album and a rallying cry to stop commercial whaling. Ban, passed away Saturday at his home in South Woodstock, Vt. He was 88.

The cause was metastatic squamous cell carcinoma, said his wife, Lisa Harrow.

Dr. Payne combined his captivating scientific research with the emotional power of music to launch one of the world’s most successful mammal conservation campaigns. He amplified the voices of whales to help win a congressional crackdown on commercial whaling in the 1970s and a global moratorium in the 1980s. Ocean Alliancea research and advocacy organization, as well as programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society and elsewhere that continue his pioneering work.

“He was instrumental in protecting and rescuing those big animals around the world,” said Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program, in an interview.

prof. Diana Reiss, director of the Animal Behavior and Conservation Program at City University of New York’s Hunter College, said in an email that Dr. empathy for whales’ and ‘became an anthem for the environmental movement’.

In a Time magazine In an essay published a few days before his death, Dr. Payne that human survival would be jeopardized unless efforts were made “to try to save all kinds of life, knowing that if we fail to save enough of the essential species, we will have no future .”

In pursuing those efforts, he wrote, society must heed other voices — including non-humans, such as whales — and listen to “what they love, fear, desire, avoid, hate, are intrigued by, and cherish” in addressing threats such as climate change and rising ocean acidity.

“Fifty years ago, people fell in love with the songs of humpback whales and banded together to spark a global conservation movement,” wrote Dr. Payne. “It’s time we listened to the whales again – and this time we do it with all the empathy and ingenuity we can muster so that we can possibly understand them.”

In 1971 Dr. Payne Ocean Alliance, now based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to study and protect whales and their environment. He was an assistant professor of biology at Rockefeller University and a research zoologist at what is now known as the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Center for Field Biology and Conservation; he also served as scientific director of the society’s Whale Fund until 1983.

In 1984 he was named a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation.

He is the author of several books, including “Among Whales” (1995), and produced or hosted six documentaries, including the IMAX film “Whales: An Unforgettable Journey” (1996). More recently, he signed on as lead advisor to Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), founded in 2020 with the aim of translating the communication of sperm whales.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Payne a moth expert and had never seen a whale. His curiosity was piqued when a harbor porpoise washed up on a beach in Massachusetts and he first heard whale calls, recorded by William Schevill of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

A friend suggested that he would have a better chance of seeing and hearing live whales in Bermuda. There he met a naval engineer who, while monitoring Soviet submarine traffic off the east coast with underwater microphones, had discovered another source of submarine noises that formed thematic patterns and seemed to last as long as 30 minutes.

The sounds came from whales, of which Dr. Payne defined the sequence of sounds as songs, sung both solo and in ensemble. The songs could sometimes be heard thousands of miles across an ocean.

“What I heard stunned me” he told The New Yorker last year.

Dr. Payne and a fellow researcher, Scott McVay, confirmed in 1967 that humpback whales sing in what Dr. Payne described as a chorus of “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound”.

He analyzed the audio with a sound spectrograph – and with collaborators including his wife and fellow researcher, Katherine (Boynton) Payne, as well as Mr McVay and an engineer, Frank Watlington – and recorded the rhythmic melody in what appeared to be an electronic music. to score. Dr. Payne then wrote in Science magazine in 1971 that humpback whales “produce a series of beautiful and varied sounds over a period of seven to thirty minutes and then repeat the same sequence with considerable precision.”

How, why, and even whether the whales actually communicated with each other remained a mystery. Whales don’t have a larynx or vocal cords, so they seem to make the sounds by forcing air from their lungs through their nasal cavities. Male humpback whales seem to make the sounds mainly during the breeding season.

Regardless of the advocacy and research that Dr. Payne and his colleagues did, it was the whale songs that captured the public imagination and started the global movement.

The music critic Donal Henahan wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that the whales produced “strange and moving lyricism,” which the Times described in a separate article as akin to a haunting duet of oboe and cornet that culminates in an eerily wailing bagpipes.

“Songs of the Humpback Whale” landed on the Billboard 200 album chart and stayed there for several weeks in 1970, initially selling over a hundred thousand copies. The track list included ‘Solo Whale’, ‘Slowed-Down Solo Whale’, ‘Tower Whales’, ‘Distant Whales’ and ‘Three Whale Trip’.

“After hearing this (preferably in a dark room), if you don’t feel you’ve been contacted with your mammalian past,” wrote Mr. Henahan, “it’s best to stop listening to vocal music .”

Some of the whales’ melodies have been incorporated by Judy Collins into a song from her “Whales and Nightingales” album. Pete Seeger was inspired by the melodies to write “Song of the World’s Last Whale”. And the New York Philharmonic performed “And God Created Great Whales,” composed by Alan Hovhaness and recorded whale songs—sounds that, Mr. Henahan wrote, “carried an overtone of ecological demise and a wordless communication from our primeval past.”

In 1977, when NASA launched Voyagers 1 and 2 to explore the far reaches of the solar system, the songs of the humpback whales were carried into space on records that could be played by any alien with a stylus.

Roger Searle Payne was born on January 29, 1935 in Manhattan to Elizabeth (Searle) Payne, a music teacher, and Edward Benedict Payne, an electrical engineer.

He graduated from Harvard in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and received a doctorate in animal behavior from Cornell University in 1961.

He married Katherine Boynton in 1960; their marriage ended in divorce in 1985. He and Mrs. Harrow, an actress and environmentalist, were married in 1991. In addition to her, he is survived by four children from his first marriage, John, Holly, Laura and Sam Payne; a stepson, Timothy Neill-Harrow; and 11 grandchildren.

“Roger’s career, his life, has been marked by his deep dedication to the life of whales and other marine life, and then to the interdependence of all species,” said Prof. Stuart Firestein, a former chair of Columbia University’s biology department. . by email. “Roger’s way was not coercion, but creating in others the awe and wonder he felt for the beauty of life on this planet.”

In his Time essay, Dr. Payne both back and to the future. “As my time runs out,” he wrote, “I am obsessed with the hope that people around the world are smart enough and flexible enough to put saving other species where it belongs: at the top of the list of our most important tasks. I believe science can help us survive our folly.”