"Whale Song" Roger Payne Hand Signed Announcement Todd Mueller COA

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"Whale Song" Roger Payne Hand Signed Announcement.
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Todd Mueller Autographs
and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-7316E
Roger Searle Payne
(born January 29, 1935) is an American
biologist
and
environmentalist
famous for the 1967 discovery (with Scott McVay) of
whale song
among
humpback whales
. Payne later became an important figure in the worldwide campaign to end
commercial whaling
. Payne was born in
New York, New York
, and received his BA degree at
Harvard University
and his Ph.D. at
Cornell
. He spent the early years of his career studying
echolocation
in
bats
(and how their food,
moths
, avoid them) and
auditory localization
in
owls
. Desiring to work with something more directly linked to conservation he later focused his research on
whales
where, together with researcher Scott McVay, in 1967 they discovered the complex sonic arrangements performed by the male humpback whales during the
breeding season
. These findings were published in the article
Songs of humpback whales
in 1971.
Payne describes the whale songs as "exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound" with long repeated "themes", each song lasting up to 30 minutes and sung by an entire group of male humpbacks at once. The songs would be varied slightly between each breeding season, with a few new phrases added on and a few others dropped. Payne has led many expeditions on the world's oceans studying whales, their migrations, cultures and vocalizations.
Payne was also the first to suggest
fin whales
and
blue whales
can communicate with sound
[4]
across whole oceans, a theory since confirmed.
[
Some of Payne's recordings were released in 1970 as an
LP
called
Songs of the Humpback Whale
(still the best-selling nature sound record of all time) which helped to gain momentum for the Save the Whales movement seeking to end
commercial whaling
, which at the time was pushing many species dangerously close to
extinction
. Commercial whaling was finally banned by the
International Whaling Commission
in 1986. In 1975 a second LP was released, and in 1987 Payne collaborated with musician
Paul Winter
putting whalesong to human music. Whale recordings by Frank Watlington (with commentary by Roger Payne) were released on a
Flexi disc
soundsheet inside the January 1979
National Geographic
magazine. This issue, at 10.5 million copies, became the largest single press run of any record at the time.
In addition to whale recordings Payne has also published books and worked with film crews on  any
television
documentary
productions and on the
IMAX
movie
Whales: An Unforgettable Journey
. In 1971, Payne founded
Ocean Alliance
, a
501(c)3
organization working with whale and ocean conservation. It is based in
Gloucester, Massachusetts
. He still heads the organization. He was also an
assistant professor
of
biology
at
Rockefeller University
and, concurrently, a research
zoologist
at the Institute for Research in Animal Behavior, run by
Rockefeller University
and the
New York Zoological Society
.
From 1960-1985 Roger Payne was married to noted elephant researcher
Katharine Payne
, who performed similar research on the vocalizations of elephants and humpbacks.