Katharine Boynton "Katy" Payne (born 1937) is an American zoologist and researcher in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Laboratory of Ornithology at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

. Payne studied music and biology in college and after a decade doing research in the savanna elephant country in

Kenya ) , national_anthem = " Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"() , image_map = , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Nairobi , coordinates = , largest_city = Nairobi ...

Zimbabwe Zimbabwe (), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and ...

, and

Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and ea ...

, she founded Cornell's Elephant Listening Project in 1999.

Early life and education

Payne was born Katharine Boynton in

Ithaca, New York Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named ...

, in 1937. Her father was a Cornell University professor and her grandfather was the wildlife illustrator Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Payne attended Cornell, where she met

Roger Payne 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 e ...

, then a graduate student. They married in 1960.

Career

Initially a researcher of whales with her then husband, Payne turned to investigating

elephant Elephants are the largest existing land animals. Three living species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. They are the only surviving members of the family Elephantidae ...

s after observing them at the

Oregon Zoo The Oregon Zoo, originally the Portland Zoo and later the Washington Park Zoo, is a zoo located in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon, approximately southwest of downtown Portland. Founded in 1888, it is the oldest zoo west of the Mississippi R ...

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: * Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States * Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...

. In 1984, she and other researchers discovered that elephants make

infrasonic Infrasound, sometimes referred to as low status sound, describes sound waves with a Audio frequency, frequency below the lower limit of human audibility (generally 20 Hertz, Hz). Hearing becomes gradually less sensitive as frequency decreases, ...

calls to one another that might be detectable at distances as far as ten kilometers. The calls aided in travel and mating. Payne founded the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) to use these calls as a means of measuring the behavior of elephants and the size of the elephant population. Payne was featured in the 1984

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

series '' The Voyage of the Mimi''. In 2004, Payne's initial recordings of elephants were selected as one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

to be added to the

National Recording Registry The National Recording Registry is a list of sound recordings that "are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States." The registry was established by the National Recording Preservati ...

Whale song research

Payne and her husband worked at sea to Bermuda in 1968. With the help of a Navy engineer, Frank Watlington monitored

hydrophone A hydrophone ( grc, ὕδωρ + φωνή, , water + sound) is a microphone designed to be used underwater for recording or listening to underwater sound. Most hydrophones are based on a piezoelectric transducer that generates an electric potenti ...

s many miles into the sea to capture the sounds of the

humpback whale The humpback whale (''Megaptera novaeangliae'') is a species of baleen whale. It is a rorqual (a member of the family Balaenopteridae) and is the only species in the genus ''Megaptera''. Adults range in length from and weigh up to . The hu ...

s. After 31 years of analyzing the recordings. Payne discovered the predictable ways in which the whales change their songs each season and, with her colleague Linda Guinee, also discovered that whales use rhymes in their songs. The spectrograms of the whale voices showed peaks, valleys, and gaps. The visual representation of the whales vocalization looked like melodies and rhythms according to Payne.

The Elephant Listening Project

The concept behind the Elephant Listening Project began to form in 1984 when Katy Payne, observing elephants in the Portland Zoo, discovered that elephants communicate in low frequencies. After four months in Portland,

's acoustic biologists Carl Hopkins and Bob Capranica partnered with Payne to record and measure the infrasonic communication and behavior of elephants. By 1999 Payne published her elephant discoveries in her book ''Silent Thunder,'' and the Elephant Listening Project was officially founded in the Laboratory of Ornithology to focus on long-term research on forest elephants. In 2005 Katy Payne retired and Peter Wrege took over the project. Since then the ELP has been listening to and studying elephant communication in the forests of Central Africa, applying Payne's insights to further her findings and to support the conservation of elephants. Co-founder of the ELP, Andrea Turkalo, conducts the longest-running study of forest elephants, at the Dzanga forest clearing in the

Central African Republic The Central African Republic (CAR; ; , RCA; , or , ) is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to the north, Sudan to the northeast, South Sudan to the southeast, the DR Congo to the south, the Republic of th ...

. Turkalo has identified more than 4,000 individual elephants and has tracked their family relationships, social behavior, history of visits to the clearing, and reproduction. These data provide the most complete source of material available for understanding forest elephant demography and behavior. The ELP has ongoing monitoring studies in

Gabon Gabon (; ; snq, Ngabu), officially the Gabonese Republic (french: République gabonaise), is a country on the west coast of Central Africa. Located on the equator, it is bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the nort ...

, Republic of Congo, and

Cameroon Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the C ...

. Through the use of autonomous sound recorders, the ELP can monitor changes in elephant activity in response to environmental conditions and changing human commercial activity in the forests, and is using the detection of poaching activity to inform and improve anti-poaching patrol strategies.

References

External links

Elephant Listening Project

ELP bio

- '' Radio Expeditions'',

National Public Radio National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

, Oct. 31, 2002.
"In the Presence of Elephants and Whales"
- ''

On Being ''On Being'' is a podcast and a former public radio program. Hosted by Krista Tippett, it examines what it calls the "animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live?" Radio program and ...

'',

American Public Media American Public Media (APM) is an American company that produces and distributes public radio programs in the United States, the second largest company of its type after NPR. Its non-profit parent, American Public Media Group, also owns and o ...

, Aug. 13, 2015 {{DEFAULTSORT:Payne, Katy 1937 births 20th-century American zoologists 21st-century American zoologists Elephant conservation American Quakers Cornell University faculty Living people Scientists from Ithaca, New York American conservationists Cornell University alumni Women zoologists