"Roger Searle Payne" is a 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 whaling/commercial whaling.

Payne studied at Harvard University and Cornell. He spent the early years of his career studying animal echolocation#Bats/echolocation in bats (and how their food, moths, avoids them) and Sound localization/auditory localization in owls. Desiring to work with something more directly linked to conservation he later focused his research on whales where he together with researcher Scott McVay in 1967 were the first to discover the complex sonic arrangements performed by the male humpback whales during the breeding season.

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 would also be the first to suggest fin whales and blue whales can communicate with sound across whole oceans.

More Roger Payne on Wikipedia.

Those were the old antiquated British forms, and they wanted a more clean American form, ... It really hadn't gotten its sea legs yet because this had never been done anywhere else in the world.

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It's a big deal to change a name.

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All variables being equal.

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Pretty much as long as the official authorities at the state or local level agree or, let's say now, don't disagree, it automatically happens.

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As far as I know, the use of the word 'slave' has never been even proposed by anyone as offensive.

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Whales are humanity's canary in the coal mine, ... As ocean pollution levels increase, marine mammals like whales will be among the first to go.

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The board members will now weigh all of this and decide. But I can tell you that since the state and the Forest Service and the counties have agreed, I would be very surprised if they were not approved.

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The most important thing to us is what the local folks want to use.

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