Roger Payne 1935–2023

(Photograph under license from Getty Images). Roger Payne, who died on June 10, 2023, at the age of 88, is best known for getting the world to understand the value of whales as living beings through his extolling the musicality of humpback whale songs. He and Scott McVay published a cover article in Science reporting that humpback whales sing beautifully complex songs, and in 1970 he produced an LP record of humpback songs that still ranks as the most popular recording ever published of natural sound. 1970 was also the year of the first Earth Day—the onset of an environmental movement that expanded public recognition of the value of the natural world and drove governments to pass laws to protect it. Until this time, whales had been viewed as cheap sources of meat, oil, and fat, but by 1972 the US Congress passed an act protecting marine mammals, with official text that recognized them “to be resources of great international significance, esthetic, and recreational as well as economic.” Here we explore what led Roger to be so instrumental in shifting our views on whale conservation from managing whaling to understanding how wildlife can provide more value to us alive than dead and how he supported new generations of whale scientists and conservationists. Most whale scientists before Roger worked with the whaling industry to cut up recently harpooned whales. By contrast, Roger was trained in Animal Behavior and Auditory Neuroscience. His early research was on directional hearing. As an undergraduate, Roger worked with Don Griffin, a biologist with the audacity to imagine that bats might echolocate and with the capacity to design experiments to prove it. Griffin showed that bats produce ultrasonic click sounds and forage as they fly by listening for echoes from prey (Griffin et al., 1960). Roger showed that owls can catch mice in total darkness just by listening to rustling sounds produced by mice when they move (Payne, 1962), and moths can avoid approaching bats by locating their echolocation clicks (Payne et al., 1966), work that led to an assistant professorship at Tufts University in 1963. Roger might well have moved on to study echolocation in toothed whales, whose echolocation capacities were being studied in controlled laboratory settings, but something motivated him to dramatically change the direction of his career from experimental research on captive animals to observational research on free-ranging whales with the explicit intention of supporting whale conservation. Earlier efforts to conserve whale populations focused on managing how many whales were killed by commercial whalers, but by the mid-1960s, it was clear that these efforts had failed. In 1966, Scott McVay published an influential article detailing how large whale species had been driven to near extinction by commercial overexploitation. McVay (1966) quoted this question from Melville's Moby Dick: “whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters?” That same year, Roger decided to redirect his research career to study live whales at sea, moving from Tufts University to the New York Zoological Society and Rockefeller University in New York City. The first opportunity Roger had to observe live whales was on a trip to Bermuda in 1967 with his then wife and scientific partner, Katharine (Katy) Payne. There, they met an ocean acoustician working for the U.S. Navy who had tape recorded some unusually melodic ocean sounds for more than a decade. These were considered biological, but mainly of interest to the Navy because they could interfere with the detection of Soviet submarines. Other biologists had reported that these sounds were made by humpback whales, but Roger, Katy, and Scott McVay went beyond just identifying the species to discover that long sequences of these sounds form songs that last 10s of minutes and are sung for many hours (Payne & McVay, 1971). Roger and Katy's training in classical music, for example learning to recognize a theme when it reappears in a sonata, may have helped them to recognize when sequences of notes repeated many minutes later in a humpback song. Spectrograms that plot frequency against time, like musical notation, helped to illustrate whole songs in a form that made it easier to see the repetitions. Katy used her musician's ear and artist's hand to trace out what her scientist's mind told her were the critical elements of these visual representations of song. As a musician, Roger was also able to go beyond the science, recognizing that his own emotional reaction to the musicality of whale songs could lead others to empathize with a mammal that leads such a different life from ours. At this point, Roger made one of his spectacularly creative mental leaps. By this point, the mismanagement of whaling led some conservationists to call for a moratorium on whaling. Roger understood the need to shake people out of associating whale conservation with arguments over the number of whales to be killed and carcasses counted by whalers. He played tapes of humpback song to meetings of government regulators, and he had the insight to realize that the musical qualities of humpback song could sell enough albums (>100,000) to redirect public support away from managing the hunting of whales to protecting endangered whale species. His relentless presentation of the beauty of whale song was part of the environmental conservation revolution of the early 1970s. Roger believed that to understand how whales are adapted to live in an ocean world you must put aside anthropocentric preconceptions and observe whales in their own environment. By 1970, Roger felt drawn to live with his own family in a wild place with whales. William Conway, the director of the New York Zoological Society, helped Roger establish a remote field camp in Patagonia and together with support from National Geographic helped fund Roger and his family to spend nearly two years living at Whale Camp. Katy had much to do with Roger's successes not only in describing humpback whale song but also in starting the longest whale field research program in the world, the study of southern right whales in Patagonia. In 1970, the Paynes began photo-identifying right whales as individuals off Peninsula Valdés (Payne, 1995). This research program continues to this day and proved inspirational to photo-identification programs on killer whales, gray whales, bottlenose dolphins, and humpback whales in the 1970s, and has since spread to many other cetacean species. From photo-identifications we have learned of populations and movements and social systems, but, above all, we have learned that whales, dolphins, and porpoises are distinctive individuals. Roger and Chris Clark in their kayak rig for observing whales by listening to and recording their sounds underwater (photo courtesy of Katy Payne and Lysa Leland). Marine mammal science has mostly been observational. Roger was trained as an experimentalist, generating hypotheses and developing ways to test them. But field work with whales also requires the skill to patiently notice new things that you never expected. Here Katy Payne proved a perfect complement to Roger. She was able to merge her skills as scientist, artist, and musician with fine-tuned senses and an exceptional capacity to draw her attention to patterns that had never been described before. For example, in the early 1980s Katy started working with captive African elephants. When a baby elephant reached its trunk to Katy through the bars of the cage, as its mother watched with concern, Katy experienced throbbing sensations. Thinking about this throbbing sensation later, Katy remembered when she was singing in a choir and heard an organ play a very low note. This suggested to her that elephants might communicate with vocalizations so low in frequency that they were on the edge of her hearing. When she played back recordings at a higher speed, the world of low-frequency elephant communication burst forth like sunshine into a dark space and blossomed into yet another path-breaking discovery (Payne, 1998). When we think of Roger Payne's contributions to science, education, and conservation, we think also of Katy Payne. Roger and Katy welcomed young students and scientist colleagues into their family at Whale Camp, at sea on ships, and at the laboratory they ran out of their house and barns in Lincoln, Massachusetts. C.W.C. and P.L.T. spent months making recordings at Whale Camp and at sea and spent months in the attic of the Payne's Lincoln home making spectrograms of whale and dolphin sounds. Most anyone working with the Paynes was welcomed into family meals that often veered into deep and fascinating discussions of science and the proper relationship between humans and the natural world. We think of Katy Payne as the ever-present wise companion who helped keep the ship afloat and reined in some of Roger's wildest of schemes, never squashing them, but always encouraging and asking him to see more efficient, more expedient, and wiser ways forward. The generosity with which Roger and Katy welcomed us remains an overwhelming memory. We try to adopt their behavior as a model for how to treat students, colleagues, and for open discussion with others whether we agree or disagree with them. We remember how Roger would call us into his office, studio, wheelhouse, wherever, and excitedly explain why some new-fangled scheme for gathering more or better data would work. We listened, we were impressed, or we argued that, no, this particular idea was not likely to work. Several of us remember a scheme to attach a capsule to the side of a whale which the researcher could sit in, or the use of a parasail from which an overhead observer could watch and photograph details of social and courtship groups of whales! To his credit, Roger always listened to his juniors, sometimes argued strongly, but always listened. To this day, we wonder what idea of his we helped squash simply because it seemed too out-of-this-world or dangerous. For example, the capsule was a bad idea for the safety of whales and researchers, but today miniaturization of electronics enables small tags to be attached to whales via suction cups to collect once unimaginable behavioral details (Johnson et al., 2009). The parasail was too dangerous because its debut was attempted in an extremely remote area off Patagonia complete with rip tides, kelp beds, and killer whales, and C.W.C. refused to rise to the occasion. Today however, applications of drone technologies are yielding scientific insights into the impacts of human activities on the health of endangered whales (Moore et al., 2021). Consistent with Roger's lifelong dedication to conservation, each of these modern technologies has been motivated by scientific discovery and conservation needs. Brilliant minds are like this, to be appreciated and perhaps steered in the most effective direction, but never silenced, never squashed. We shudder at the possibility that we may have helped to squash even one of his fine ideas, even those that seemed outrageous. Before Roger's passing, we also had the unimaginable joy of returning to him with gifts of successful discoveries inspired by his original ideas and passion for the living ocean. Roger was also able to use his sense of humor to correct our own errors. For example, in 1973, B.W. and his team were radio tracking dusky dolphins in Patagonia and excitedly following dolphin surfacing “beeps” with a recently developed directional antenna system. These were the first-ever tracked duskies (and only the second-ever tracked dolphins), and Whale Camp was abuzz. We tracked from the Campo and from a promontory about 25 km away. This allowed us to time surfacings and triangulate positions to study dolphin use of habitat, speeds and orientations of movement, surfacing/breath rates, etc. Roger kindly lent his mapping skills (and his nights!) by placing compass bearings from both positions onto a large marine chart on the dining room table and relaying those positions to the student investigator at the remote promontory, who was huddled in a sleeping bag during always-chilly nights. There is an inherent error to triangulated positions and this error naturally becomes larger the further the radio signal is from one or both receivers. Well, on that first night, Roger relayed one of the new positions to the far-off observer, explaining that we already had publishable findings, perhaps for Science or Nature. He sounded excited over the crackling static of the portable radio and assured us that the newly acquired data were remarkable. The tracks (without error consideration) had placed one of the dolphins about 1.5 km inland, and Roger explained how this proved that dusky dolphins are amphibious, climbing onto the cliffs and flippering inland, at least at night. He exulted that the student's PhD dissertation and fame were assured. He elicited tired smiles from us all. Roger was a fine communicator; he patiently, succinctly, and kindly instructed especially young aspiring ones to write well. B.W. remembers the very first draft of a PhD chapter given to Roger. When it was returned, there were myriad rewrites of just about every sentence, comments that pointed out that this section should be shortened and put elsewhere, this one removed all together, a new one of this type added, a logical flaw corrected …. At the top of the draft he wrote, “Good start in science, but your writing reminds me of the tangled line of a mis-cast fishing reel. It lacks your usual direct and clear way of speaking.” B.W. took this to heart, and slowly improved. Roger's clear direct comments pointed the way. For those of us he mentored, it seemed as though the wilder our plans, the more enthusiasm they generated in Roger. He was particularly keen to help, advise and take part in an expedition to try to study living sperm whales in the Indian Ocean from 1981–1984 led by Jonathan Gordon and Hal Whitehead (Whitehead, 1990). Roger loaned equipment, generated countless ideas, and smoothed the often-difficult interactions with governments, funders and media. And he never asked for credit. The excitement of a novel and somewhat foolhardy project in an exotic setting (Sri Lanka) seemed enough enticement. But that project launched Jonathan and Hal on deeper studies of sperm whales in other oceans, and Roger himself to conceive a world-girdling 5-year voyage of the R/V Odyssey to study contaminants in sperm whales along with their global population structure (Clark et al., 2005.) Roger showed similar vision and support when Peter Madsen as a PhD student had a falling out with his supervisor on whether to use a harpoon (supervisor) or a suction cup (Madsen) when deploying tags on whales. At this point, Madsen had no money to do field work with 15 months left of his PhD. When he had lost all hope of ever graduating, Roger let him use his research vessel R/V Odyssey for free in Papua New Guinea in May 2001 to try to deploy his acoustic tag on sperm whales. Three weeks into the trip, Madsen and Roger finally tagged a whale, and the photograph below was taken when they both realized that there were data on the tag after recovery (Madsen et al., 2002). Roger and Peter Madsen realize that their sperm whale tag has downloaded data successfully (photo courtesy of Chris Johnson). Over his career, Roger mentored hundreds to thousands of students in science and conservation, at all levels from kids to PhDs. It is remarkable that his name is not on more research papers with many of those students, and that is because when authorship was offered, as his brilliant mentorship and practical help at all levels certainly deserved coauthorship, he almost always declined, saying “I have not contributed enough.” So it is that his original idea of theodolite tracking dolphins and whales does not carry his name, ditto for long-term recognition of dolphins by photo-identification, ditto for much of right and humpback whale acoustic and other behavioral research, of early important findings on social relationships and feeding of bowhead whales, and so on. His lesson of not wanting or needing authorship unless he was directly and closely involved in all aspects of research from the glimmer of an idea through data gathering, analysis, writing and rewriting, final discussion, should perhaps be practiced by more scientists, whether they be junior or senior. Roger and Melany Würsig calibrating theodolites in preparation for tracking dolphins (photo courtesy of B.W.). In the early years of our then innocent careers, we were all extremely fortunate to learn from our experiences with both Roger and Katy. Through their ideas and actions, we learned that our vocations and avocations could be one and the same. Roger and Katy were Pied Pipers; encouraging us to explore novel ideas while pointing us toward directions that somehow seemed magically possible. Much of this occurred as notions of animal awareness and consciousness were finally transitioning from a scientific taboo to an exciting research direction (Griffin, 1976). These experiences catapulted us into unexplored realms full of countless opportunities and discoveries; encouraged us to develop novel methods to observe free-ranging marine mammals, to merge visual and acoustic observations, and to think how to study whales over their entire lifetimes as they swam over thousands of Roger's almost always and seemed enough to us and our for beyond he ideas that that others would have to but that he only to He took in we could home to to and to our understanding of the of animal behavior and the natural world. We all on the of and one of them his last

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