Songs of the Humpback Whale with Roger Payne
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2021
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About 300,000 whales and dolphins are killed every year as a result of human activity. Why is this allowed to continue? Roger Payne asked that same question before deciding to put his expertise toward this issue.
He would eventually become well-known as the person who discovered that humpback whales sing songs.
Tune in to learn:
- At what distances whale sounds can be heard, and how the increase in sound pollution has changed this
- The likely function of repeated patterns of "clicks" made by whales
- Why beluga whales are sometimes called "sea canaries"
Founder and President of Ocean Alliance, Roger Payne, has spent decades studying the function and nature of the sounds that animals make and hear.
As the environmental crisis became increasingly serious, Payne wanted to shift his research efforts toward an animal that is actively threatened by the state of the environment.
He chose whales—which, at the time, he knew absolutely nothing about. Payne began studying whales and whale songs at Rockefeller University. He explains what it means to say a whale (or other animal) "sings a song," the insight he's gained from observing whale behavior over the years, and so much more.
Visit https://whale.org/ to learn more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Forget frequently asked questions. |
| 0:02.0 | Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. |
| 0:05.0 | How about advice from a real genius? |
| 0:07.0 | 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified in license. |
| 0:11.0 | 5%? |
| 0:12.0 | Go above and beyond. |
| 0:13.0 | They become very good at what they do. |
| 0:15.0 | But only 0.1% are real geniuses. |
| 0:18.0 | Richard Jacobs has made his life's mission to find them. |
| 0:22.0 | For you, he hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. |
| 0:25.0 | Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. |
| 0:29.0 | Come the geniuses. |
| 0:30.0 | This is the Finding Genius Podcast. |
| 0:33.0 | But Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:36.0 | Before we begin, a note from our sponsor. |
| 0:40.0 | I'm Richard Jacobs, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Finding Genius Foundation, and host of the Finding Genius Podcast. |
| 0:46.0 | In late 2016, I was re-rendered at 65 miles an hour by a truck on the highway, which sent me off-road into a ditch. |
| 0:54.0 | The impact of the collision gave me a concussion and other injuries. |
| 0:58.0 | At the hospital, a CT scan showed that I had thyroid nodules, which turned out to be cancer. |
| 1:03.0 | It was then, when I had a biopsy, my neck, that I realized, even if I was a million there, |
| 1:08.0 | I wouldn't want a second or a third biopsy due to the pain and the invasiveness of it. |
| 1:12.0 | And appointments at that time for thyroid experts were three to six months out. |
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