According to the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project, Japan has a much higher level of concern over global warming than the U.S. - 78 percent to 47 percent. But Japan's appetite for endangered animals continues, especially for whale meat.

Maybe the Japanese have yet to discover that whales are not fish - they are warm-blooded mammals like we are.

But we were all once in the dark about whales being like us. In 1818, in a high profile trial of the day, a New York merchant of sperm whale oil was fined for not reporting three barrels of the oil he claimed was just fish oil. For three days, the intelligentsia of the city argued over what whales were. It took the state legislature to finally decree the whale was a mammal.

Even New Yorker Herman Melville knew better in 1851. He had his Moby Dick character, Ishmael, espousing, "I take the good old-fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me."

Perhaps if Melville knew that whales sang songs, he would have written his classic story differently.

"One could only imagine that his response would be as immediate and amazed as that of the musicians and composers for whom Roger (Payne) played the songs when they heard the

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intriguing six-octave songs for the first time."

So said Scott McVay of those early days of discovery of "the long, elegant and complex songs" of the humpback whale. McVay and Payne made the discovery in the 1960s after listening to underwater recordings made by a Bermudan friend of Payne's working for the Navy's sonar station set up to track Russian submarines back in the cold war days.

"The whales were passing Bermuda as they migrated between Caribbean breeding grounds and feeding grounds much further to the north," wrote Payne, "singing as they went."

Both Payne and McVay were in Manhattan last month to celebrate Earth Day at an event at the New York Public Library. They were featured speakers at a novel symposium on "the history, science and perennial romance of the Leviathan in America."

McVay, former head of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and founder of its Poetry Festival, champion of whale conservation and chaser of "rare, majestic Bowhead whales in the Arctic," is a fascinating man of accomplishment and ideas.

Dr. Roger Payne, perhaps the world's premier whale biologist, now lives in Vermont when he's not chasing whales all over the world. He brought up four children on the wild shores of Patagonia so he and wife Katy Payne could study right whales. Katy Payne went on to discover that elephants communicate by infrasound (below the level of human hearing).

Her work has become the work of my daughter, Melissa Groo, who with Katy Payne has swum with whales off the coast of the Dominican Republic.

Introducing the two men was David Rothenberg, a curious blend of musician, philosopher and teacher who accompanies bird song and whale song with his clarinet. He's the author of a new book on whale song called Thousand Mile Song.

Humpbacks, said Rothenberg, "have the longest and most complex songs of any animal, including human beings" and can extend to 24 hours. Before the invention of hydrophones (underwater microphones) no one had heard their songs. Scholars are suggesting the humpback's song might be the origin of the myth of the sirens singing to Odysseus on his way home to Penelope.

McVay, who became a whale enthusiast after reading Moby Dick, first studied dolphin communication with "a crazy scientist, John Lilly," said Rothenberg, before working on the "strange sounds" recorded off Bermuda with Payne in a Princeton laboratory.

The two produced the classic record, "Songs of the Humpback Whale," a few of which Carl Sagan sent out into the universe on Voyager I and II.

Though the male humpbacks sing during breeding season, he said, "female whales (who don't sing) never seem to show any interest." The question remains, do they sing for each other, to mark their territory or to show their prowess?

Rothenberg played a recording of whale song that sounded a mix of magnified bullfrog, lion roar and howler monkey - then played along with his clarinet.

McVay spoke of being captured by "the everlasting itch for things remote," as Melville wrote in Moby Dick. After seeing the first Arctic Bowhead whale surface, he had "pursued him eagerly." Melville had also cautioned him, "Whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase."

It was the harpoon cannon, he said, that had brought "the remorseless assault" on whales in the 20th century.

McVay took his concern and his humpback whale songs to Japan in 1970 where they made a sensation. He has worked since to stop the killing of whales. But "these days in Japan," he said, "you can go into a market and see whale meat of blue whales, right whales and humpbacks."

Payne, who founded and heads up the Oceanic Alliance, which studies and seeks to protect whales, echoed McVay's bad news. "Despite the moratorium on killing whales," he said, "the number of whales killed has increased exponentially." And this year the Japanese added humpbacks to their Arctic "scientific research" list. And no longer were mothers and calves exempted from the hunt.

He spoke of "the appalling suffering" being experienced by whales at the hands of "the biggest whaling nations" of Norway, Iceland - and Japan. "She (Japan) has the oceans to herself. Any size (whale), any place and by whatever means."

The humpback song was ancient, he said. "It predates our human species for thousands of years. When people hear it, they are moved to tears."

Anne W. Semmes covers education and the police beat for the Greenwich Citizen. E-mail: asemmes@gmail.com.