Roger Payne, biologist who discovered that whales could sing, dead at 88

Roger Payne, a biologist who discovered that whales could sing, resulting in a hit album, died on Saturday. He was 88.

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Payne died at his home in South Woodstock, Vermont, The New York Times reported. The cause of death was metastatic squamous cell carcinoma, according to his wife, Lisa Harrow.

Payne spurred a worldwide movement to ban commercial whaling after he learned that whales serenade one another, according to the newspaper.

Payne found out about the whales’ mooing, shrieking and squealing sounds during a research trip to Bermuda in 1967, The Associated Press reported. A Navy engineer had given him a recording of curious sounds that he heard while listening for Soviet submarines, according to the news organization.

The songs could sometimes be heard for thousands of miles across an ocean, the Times reported.

“What I heard blew my mind,” Payne told The New Yorker in 2022.

“It seemed obvious that here, finally, was a chance to get the world interested in preventing the extinction of whales,” Payne told Nautilus Quarterly in 2021, according to the AP.

Payne and a fellow researcher, Scott McVay, confirmed that humpback whales sing in a chorus of “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound,” the Times reported.

Payne would produce the album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” in 1970, according to the AP. The record was a hit and created a global movement to stop commercial whale hunting in an effort to save the species from extinction.

“Songs” remains the best-selling environmental album in history, according to The Guardian.

Payne helped forge a congressional crackdown on commercial whaling during the 1970s and a global moratorium in the ‘80s, the Times reported. In 1971 he founded Ocean Alliance, a research and advocacy organization.

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, the Times reported.

Payne wrote several books, including “Among Whales” in 1965, according to the newspaper. He produced or hosted six documentaries, including “Whales: An Unforgettable Journey” in 1996. He became the principal adviser to Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), which was founded in 2020 with the goal of translating the communication of sperm whales, the AP reported.