The paper in which he announced his discovery appeared in Science in the summer of 1971. The humpbacks always made their wails, squeals, and grunts in a particular order-A, B, C, D, E and never A, B, D, C, E, in Payne’s formulation.

The exercise took years, but eventually it confirmed what he had suspected. With the help of a machine called a sound spectrograph, Payne converted the voices on the tape into a series of squiggle-like notations. Finally, it dawned on him that what he was listening to had a structure. Payne found the tape mesmerizing and listened to it hundreds of times. The sounds-made, the engineer had determined, by humpback whales-ranged from mournful wails that evoked the call of a shofar to high-pitched cries that resembled the squeals of piglets. Payne took a copy of the tape home with him. He played a tape of some of them to Payne, who later recalled, “What I heard blew my mind.” While listening for enemy subs, the engineer had chanced upon other undersea sounds. There he met an engineer who had worked for the United States Navy, monitoring Soviet submarines via microphones installed off the coast. At the suggestion of an acquaintance, he made his way to Bermuda. He had been studying moths now he decided to switch his attention to cetaceans.Īside from the dead one, Payne had never actually seen a whale, nor did he know where whales could be observed. Payne stood in the rain for a long time, gazing at the corpse. Someone had hacked off its flukes, and another person, or perhaps the same one, had stuck a cigar butt in its blowhole. Two passersby had carved their initials in its flanks.

When he arrived, he discovered that the animal had been mutilated. Although it was a cold, wet March night, he decided to drive to the shore. One evening almost sixty years ago, a Tufts University researcher named Roger Payne was working in his lab when he heard a radio report about a whale that had washed up on a beach nearby.

The 100 secret senses