52 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
PROFILEsuspected might have come from the humpback whales that would
occasionally swim by the listening station. When Watlington played
his recordings, Payne was awestruck by the sounds. “It was absolutely
fantastic,” Payne says. “I had never heard anything like it.”
Immediately, Payne realized that he had stumbled onto
an invaluable tool. These sounds, he thought, were the key to
making the public listen to—and care about—these creatures. “It
was clear to me that nobody would be able to hear these sounds
without having them deeply affect them,” Payne explains. Payne
asked Watlington for a couple of his tapes, which he took home
and played hundreds of times. As he listened to the recordings,
he quickly realized that certain sounds would recur at regular
intervals. This repetition suggested that the whales were singing
structured songs.
Several years later, Payne worked with Scott McVay, who was
then an administrator at Princeton University, to create detailed
visual representations called spectrograms of the humpback
whale recordings. The pair confirmed that the animals were
producing a series of sounds that would last for up to 30 minutes,
then repeat, verifying that humpback whales do indeed sing songs
(Science, 173:585–97, 1971).
This discovery “opened the world’s eye to the notion that
[these whales] are not just swimming bags of blubber, that they
have these extraordinary communication features, which, even
then, hinted at complex social interactions,” says Scott Kraus,
the chief scientist for marine mammal conservation at the New
England Aquarium, who met Payne while studying right whales
off the coast of Argentina in the 1970s. “I would say that this was
his most important contribution [to science].”
In 1971, Payne founded the Ocean Alliance, an organization
dedicated to the protection of whales and their environment,
and while continuing his research, spent time spreading the
word about whale songs to anyone who would lend him an ear. “I
figured that if you could build these sounds into human culture,
you could maybe get a movement going to save the whales,”
he says. Payne’s plan worked. Several musicians, including
the singer Judy Collins and the saxophonist Paul Winter,
incorporated Payne’s recordings into their own music.
Payne also coproduced his own records of whale songs and
has written, directed, and featured in numerous television
and film documentaries about his work. This activity spurred
many conservation organizations to action. It helped spark
Greenpeace’s “Save the Whales” campaign, which raised the
public’s awareness of whale hunting around the globe. After
facing pressure from the global community, the International
Whaling Commission voted to place a ban on commercial
whaling in 1982.
Later that decade, Payne left the Rockefeller University to
focus his research on conservation through Ocean Alliance.WHALES IN THE WILD
Payne’s first trip to Bermuda was one of more than a hundred
field expeditions that followed. His research on whales broughthim back to Bermuda on numerous occasions, as well as to
Hawaii, Mexico, Alaska, Argentina, and other destinations.
Payne’s family joined him on almost all of his voyages. His
former wife, K aty, assisted in his research. She created numerous
spectrograms of whale vocalizations and coauthored papers about
the animals. According to Payne, one of Katy’s most important
contributions was discovering how whale songs change depending
on the season and location. (Later, Katy herself became famous
for discovering that elephants use low frequency “rumbles” to
communicate.) “I was determined that I wasn’t going to have to
go into the field without my family,” Payne says. “It worked out
beautifully in the end—the kids were good company to everyone,
and that improved how people got along, which was the absolute
essence of whether an expedition would be a success or not.”
Payne’s work didn’t come without controversy, however.
Together with Douglas Webb, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institute, he calculated how far whales’ songs could
be heard using variables such as the loudness and frequency of their
vocalizations. The duo postulated that the songs of baleen whales,
which are very loud and very low-frequency, could travel thousands
of miles in the deep waters of a quiet ocean (Ann NY Acad Sci,
188:110–41, 1971). “That came closer to destroying my whole career
than anything else I did,” Payne says. “People said, ‘This guy is just
a whale enthusiast and of course you can’t hear them that far.’”
Payne was certain of the calculations, though, and two decades
later, Christopher Clark, a bioacoustics researcher at Cornell
University and one of Payne’s former students, experimentally
confirmed this theory using data collected from the US Navy’s
undersea microphones. “I was listening to a whale singing in
Ireland, and I was listening to it off of Bermuda,” Clark says.
“The hair still goes up on the back of my neck when I remember
thinking, ‘Holy shit, Roger’s right.’”
The function of these ultra-long-distance songs remains a
mystery, but Payne has a hypothesis: it allows whales to spread
over entire oceans and still communicate with each other when
necessary. For example, certain whale species, such as blue and
finback whales, don’t have any known mating grounds. One
potential reason for this, according to Payne, is that they can
call to each other across vast distances, making it unnecessary
to have a designated meeting spot. This skill could also come in
handy when hunting. Schools of krill, the main prey for some
whales, pop up in unpredictable locations—so whales may also
use their ability to transmit information about the location of food
to relatives across the ocean.
Payne is currently working on three books, two about his
research on whales, and one on the importance of wildlife
conservation. All three are aimed at a broad audience. “I’m trying
to write in a more general way about the world, because I feel
heartbroken as to the current direction that everything seems to
be headed,” he says. “I think the biggest mistake we make now
is failing to recognize that we are totally interdependent on the
rest of life. That’s the message I’m trying hardest to get across to
the world.” g