Roger Payne's Study Of Whales

In 1971, biologist Roger Payne set out on what would be the first of many trips to Argentina. It was on one of these trips that Payne came across a female white whale and moved in close. "She was asleep," he recalls, "but after a while she opened her eye and looked me over. You would see her eyeball rolling in her head and then she closed her eye again. Basically, the whale was just saying, Well, if you've seen one of us, you've seen them all."
Born in 1935 in New York, Payne has been studying whales for 40 years. He has built his career on science and activism, but ask him what it's like to swim with a whale and what you hear in his voice is awe. "It's like nothing you've ever done. You can't imagine that an animal that big could be so graceful.
When you swim with them, you discover that they can turn and manoeuvre in ways that leave you stunned."
There is a similar quality to the stories of whale watchers, astronauts and mountain climbers: a desire to experience an extreme feeling of smallness in the face of something enormous.
However, Payne decided to study whales without ever having seen one. He had spent much of his career studying bats, owls and then moths. I wasn't doing anything that was directly related to people's destruction of the wild world. So I thought, "With your training, which animal could you work with that needs help, for which sounds are very important?"
Payne chose whales. In 1967, he discovered, along with researcher Scott McVay, that male humpback whales create songs that contain many elements, such as rhyme, rhythm and structure, that are also found in human music. The songs varied a little every year, with bits being added and removed. To Payne, this suggested that musical composition was a natural process rather than a unique part of human culture.
However, scientists were less than enthusiastic. "When I first suggested that whales could hear each other across oceans, it very nearly ruined my career," says Payne. Other scientists laughed at his discoveries, which made it difficult to get government grants for his research. By the time they had accepted the idea of humpback songs, Payne had already transformed whales into a powerful symbol of the need to protect our
planet.
He became an environmentalist at a time when there wasn't much of an environmental movement to join. Greenpeace was just getting started and the commercial whaling industry was still very much alive. However, as people understood more about how whales lived, they became increasingly horrified by how they were killed. While Payne didn't coin the term 'save the whales' his work on whale conservation laid the foundation for the Save-the-Whales campaign, one of the first popular environmental movements in America.
Although commercial whaling was banned in 1986, whale populations are still under threat. Norway has repeatedly ignored the ban, Iceland has started to openly hunt whales again and Japan kills about 440 whales every year for what it calls 'scientific research'. These countries have also campaigned to get the ban lifted completely. Meanwhile, many species of whale face extinction and could soon disappear completely.
"The Save-the-Whales movement was an important first step," says Payne, "Now I have come to believe that if the whales can't save us, nothing can. Whales can remind us of our smallness, and of the brief time we've had on this planet." Payne, the biologist turned conservationist, may have been the first to understand that the secret to our own survival may be in understanding our own insignificance.