This photo provided by Ocean Alliance shows Roger Payne on board Ocean Alliance’s research vessel RV Odyssey during the Voyage of the Odyssey, a groundbreaking toxicology study circumnavigating the globe, in 2002 off of Western Australia in the Indian Ocean. Payne, the scientist who spurred a world-wide environmental conservation movement with his discovery that whales can sing, has died. He was 88.
He saw the discovery of whale song as a chance to spur interest in saving the giant animals, who were disappearing from the planet. Payne would produce the album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” in 1970. A surprise hit, the record galvanized a global movement to end the practice of commercial whale hunting and save the whales from extinction.
Payne died Saturday of pelvic cancer. He lived in South Woodstock, Vermont, with his wife, the actress Lisa Harrow. Funeral arrangements have not yet been made, Harrow said. Whale songs would enter the popular imagination via everything from a 1971 episode of “The Partridge Family” to a 1979 issue of National Geographic that included a flexi disc with excerpts from “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” It remains the best-selling environmental album in history.
“He had a presence and a way of connecting to people that led them to dedicating their lives to protecting whales and our planet Earth,” Kerr said.
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