A Toxic Odyssey

News Focus Roger Payne’s discovery of whale song helped make the animals icons of conservation; now he’s helping turn them into symbols of how humans are poisoning the oceans A Toxic Odyssey THE INDIAN OCEAN, 2°N, 72°E—Seven days of fin and blue whales carry information down the blue rim of the horizon, the crew have rolled by without a sighting. Although clear across the oceans. But the focus of his is getting antsy. But just when it seems that the waters over these deep ocean trenches research out here is pollution—specifically, all the whales have fled for the poles, the hy- east of the Maldives are a well-known feed- the class of humanmade chemicals known as drophone speakers erupt with clicks. “We’ve ing ground for sperm whales, the crew of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which got whales!” says Payne with a grin. The the Odyssey has seen nothing larger than a can sabotage biochemical processes by mim- glowing dots on the computer screen show a pod of playful dolphins, riding the ship’s icking hormones. Some scientists fear that group of 20 sperm whales feeding just bow wave and flinging themselves into the these compounds would become so concen- ahead. Bowls of cereal and cups of coffee air like Chinese acrobats. A man with silver trated in marine ecosystems that fish stocks are left half-full as the crew springs into ac- flyaway hair steps out from the pilothouse would be rendered too toxic for human con- tion and the Odyssey surges forward. and squints up at the observation deck, sumption. “No one knows how polluted the where two crew members are scanning the oceans are,” says Payne, “because no system- A life among whales horizon. “A gold doubloon for the first man atic, global study has been made.” For Payne, this voyage is part of a personal to spot a whale!” he booms, imitating Cap- To try to plug that gap, Payne has assem- odyssey that began exactly 50 years ago tain Ahab from Moby-Dick. bled a 12-person crew of scientists and edu- when, as a “green” Harvard freshman, he Like Ahab, Roger Payne has been plying cators to circumnavigate the globe for 5 was asked to baby-sit some bats. These were the seas in a tireless search for sperm whales, years aboard the Odyssey, a 28-meter float- the furry research subjects of the late Donald the largest of the toothed whales. Unlike ing laboratory. Because POPs become in- Griffin, the renowned biologist who discov- Ahab’s ship the Pequod, however, the creasingly concentrated at higher levels of ered echolocation. Up to this point, Payne Odyssey is equipped with tissue-sampling the food chain, Payne’s strategy for deter- says he “had no idea you could make a living crossbows instead of harpoons and a toxicol- mining the extent of pollution is to measure doing something like biology.” After Griffin ogy lab instead of blubber-boiling tryworks. contamination in the blubber of sperm became his undergraduate research mentor, Payne is best known for revealing that the whales—a top predator found in all oceans. Payne became “obsessed” with bioacoustics. unearthly vocalizations of humpback whales After 4 years at sea, his team’s early results He went on to do his Ph.D. research on how are structured like songs, a discovery that are looking grim: The chemicals have owls use sound to locate prey, and during his made the cover of Science in 1971 (16 Au- accumulated in the fat of every sample ana- postdoc he showed how moths use sound to gust), and for his hypothesis that the sounds lyzed so far, even from places farther from evade predators. “The secret of Roger’s suc- land than anywhere cess,” says Thomas Eisner, an entomologist else on Earth. The at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, presence of POPs, par- who helped supervise Payne’s Ph.D., “is his ticularly in coastal en- creative, playful mind and infectious pas- vironments, has long sion.” Eisner recalls Payne constantly zip- been known, says John ping around campus on his bicycle wearing a Stegeman, a toxicolo- cape and a cello on his back. gist at the Woods Hole Then, Griffin called on Payne once Oceanographic Institu- again. Griffin had moved to Rockefeller tion in Massachusetts, University in New York City, and he per- but Payne’s study is suaded Payne to join him there to pursue crucial because it will something new. It was the late 1960s, recalls provide a global snap- Payne, and “I felt that what I was doing was shot of the extent of not relevant to the problems that assailed the contamination. world around me. The wild world I loved To take such sam- above all else was being destroyed. Then I ples, of course, the in- thought of whales.” Commercial whaling trepid researchers must was then in its heyday, with tens of thou- first find whales. After sands of whales slaughtered each year. “I No ordinary whaler. The Odyssey is in the last year of a 5-year voyage this unusually long thought, If I studied whales, maybe I could to measure persistent organic pollutants in sperm whale blubber. hiatus of 7 days staring find a way to change their fate.” FLIP NICKLIN;CREDITS: BOTTOM) TO ALLIANCE CHRIS JOHNSON/OCEAN (TOP 1584 11 JUNE 2004 VOL 304 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org N EWS F OCUS A big question at the time was “just what into the public gaze: The “Save the Whales” and even a knighthood from the prince of the whales are doing with such big brains.” movement was born. “Most people’s idea of Netherlands. But saving the whales has also Payne suspected that they were using them whales was limited to Moby-Dick,” recalls come at a price. In 1985 he left Rockefeller to to process and communicate complex Payne. So he teamed up with poets, musi- devote himself to the Ocean Alliance, which sounds, but “I had never even seen a whale.” cians, and “anyone he could get hold of ” to he had incorporated in 1981 to promote the So, he bought a ticket for Bermuda, where generate sympathy. The haunting songs be- preservation of the ocean. The move later humpback whales were known to pass in guiled the public: A vinyl record of Payne’s seemed like “one of the bigger mistakes of their migrations. There he met Frank humpback tapes, included in the December my life,” he says. Keeping the nonprofit Watlington, a Bermudian engineer studying 1976 issue of National Geographic, is still afloat “has left me no more than 10% of my underwater sound for the U.S. Navy. The the largest single print order in the history of time for basic research, which is the love that Navy was interested in listening for Soviet the recording industry. Payne went on to got me into all of this in the first place.” submarines, but in his spare time, Watling- host, write, or direct several award-winning But here aboard the Odyssey, among the ton had also recorded hours of bizarre un- documentaries about whales for television whales again, Payne is in his element. He first derwater sounds that Payne later confirmed as well as an IMAX film. had the idea for the voyage 26 years ago. To were coming from whales. Governments responded to the surging make this possible, Payne and the Ocean Al- Payne spent weeks wearing a pair of head- interest by creating the largest animal sanc- liance raised $3 million from private donors phones, listening over and over to one tape in tuaries on Earth—the Indian Ocean north of and foundations, about $750,000 short of particular. The whales were producing very 55° south latitude in 1979 and later most of what is needed to complete the voyage. “It’s complex vocalizations—traversing eight oc- taken a long time to realize taves in pitch from deep, organlike rumbles to this dream,” he says, “but it’s high-frequency, flutelike glissandos—but finally come true. It’s so good there just wasn’t any obvious structure. Then it to be doing research so far suddenly came together. He noticed that the from land.” entire performance repeated after about 15 minutes. Payne was ecstatic. It isn’t just ran- Canaries of the sea dom, he thought. “These are repeated, rhyth- “We’ve got a blow at 1 mic sequences: They’re songs!” o’clock, about 300 meters!” Payne and whale advocate Scott McVay, crackles a voice over the ra- then an administrator at Princeton University dio from the observation in New Jersey, later demonstrated the song deck. In the distance, a white structure together. This was long before the plume floats over the water days of home computers. McVay had access like a puff of steam. Moments to a machine that transcribed sounds onto pa- later, a second plume, smaller per with a stylus. Sure enough, the repeating than the first, jets into the air. structure was plain to see. The “pioneering, “Make that two blows.” Bob detailed studies” were among the first to Wallace, the ship’s engineer show “the significance of sound to marine at the helm, closes in and mammals,” says John Hildebrand, a bio- then cuts the engines. acoustics researcher at the Scripps Institution Odyssey glides quietly closer of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. to the pair. Just what exactly the whales are saying Payne may be 69 years to each other is another question, one that old, but he’s the first to run Payne and others have pursued ever since.

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