Studying Underwater Acoustics

If you could talk to an animal, which one would it be?

For CMU alumna Taylor Hersh, it would be a sperm whale. As a bioacoustician, she has spent her career trying to understand what whales say to each other.

Hersh studies sounds and vocalizations produced by marine mammals, and then analyzes the data to learn about their behavior, culture and social structure. The bulk of her past research focused on sperm whales. Different groups of sperm whales have different dialects, just like humans, and her work has helped scientists better understand how their dialects vary over space and time.

That’s why she’d love to talk to one.

“I'm so curious if we've gotten any of it right,” Hersh said. “We take the data and we look for patterns and trends and we try and make sense of it, but at the end of the day, you can't ask the whales ‘What does this social vocalization mean to you?’. So I think that would be really fun to be able to have like an hour-long conversation.”

Combining Interests

Bioacoustics is a perfect fit for Hersh, who has always been interested in science and social behavior.

Although she didn’t realize it at the time, CMU was the perfect starting point to get her there.

Hersh applied to CMU because of the tuition benefit her mom received as an advisor at the Tepper School of Business. She wanted to study biology, but wasn’t sure that CMU’s curriculum would adequately prepare her to work in her field of choice — marine biology.

Thanks to the biology department faculty, Hersh’s perspective quickly changed.

Teaching professor and director of undergraduate laboratories Carrie Doonan, who oversaw some of Hersh’s biology labs, was one of the faculty members who challenged her to think differently.

“She was the first person who, when I would ask a question, wouldn't give me the answer,” Hersh said. “She was very, very much pushing us to figure things out or at least come up with better questions to ask her. ‘What’s the answer?’ didn't work. I became a more critical thinker and a more independent thinker through those labs.”

“Taylor was a very detail-oriented student who excelled in the lab classes,” Doonan said. “It was a pleasure to watch her use her analytical and critical thinking skills and apply them to a different area of biology — marine biology. She was so passionate about this area. I enjoyed talking with her about her interest even after graduation, and am happy to see her thrive."

Hersh also learned important lessons from associate professor Dannie Durand, whose phylogenetics course about the evolutionary history of organisms taught her how to analyze scientific data, and teaching professor and MCS associate dean for undergraduate affairs Maggie Braun, who encouraged her to get creative with internships to be competitive in the field.

That creativity is exactly what led Hersh to bioacoustics.

Creating a Career

Part way through her degree program, Hersh added a second major. She wanted to pursue her interest in both science and social behavior, and CMU’s interdisciplinary curriculum made it possible.

She graduated from the Mellon College of Science in 2014 with bachelor’s degrees in biological sciences and psychology, and spent the next two years doing various internships in marine mammal research.

Two of those internships — studying dolphins in Florida and southern right whales in Argentina — involved bioacoustics, and the work piqued her interest.

“It was the first time that I realized how much behavior you can learn about from studying what the animals are saying and sounds underwater,” Hersh said.

It was also the first time she heard about Hal Whitehead, a university research professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who studies the social behavior and communication of deep-water whales.

Hal eventually became Hersh’s Ph.D. supervisor at Dalhousie, overseeing her thesis work on sperm whales.

“If I look back at my time at CMU, having this biology and psychology and social behavior interest and then realizing, through these internships, that I really liked acoustics work, it makes sense that I then ended up doing my Ph.D. on sperm whale social communication with Hal,” she said.

Rigorous Research

Hersh received her Ph.D. in biology from Dalhousie University in 2022.

She has continued to work in bioacoustics, completing postdoctoral research positions with the Comparative Bioacoustics Group, where she studied harbor seals and African penguins in the Netherlands, and with the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, where she studied bottlenose dolphins and bowhead whales.

In 2024, she was named one of five women in science awardees by L’Oreal USA, receiving a $60,000 grant to support her research. It was a huge honor for Hersh, and it taught her an important lesson about the value of her work.

“I almost didn’t apply,” she said. “I was looking at the past women who'd been awarded it and didn't see someone doing anything quite like what I do. So I thought that meant I wasn't a good candidate for it. But that actually was what they liked. They are trying to support women in very diverse disciplines within science and tech. I think it was a good reminder that you miss every shot you don't take. And it was just really validating.”

In April, Hersh began a three-year fellowship with the Human Frontier Science Program at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England, where she is studying a specific type of whistle produced by bottlenose dolphins.

Like with her other postdoctoral positions, she expects to spend a few months in the field collecting data. It can be hard work, but it’s also very rewarding.

“I think what I've loved the most about my job is that it's taken me to beautiful places and I've gotten to see amazing animals just living their lives,” she said. “I think that's my favorite part. And it makes the experience of then coming back to the office, where we are for a lot of the year, more special.

“Most of the time you're processing and analyzing the data you've collected. But I find that if you've had a hand in collecting it, it just makes it very fulfilling to then be working with it later.”

She’s also learned a lot about the research process along the way, including the amount of time it takes to produce a result.

“You have to learn to be comfortable with the fact that [for] some things you're not going to have a product right away,” Hersh said. “You never know how long things are going to take. And I think I've gotten better at accepting that. But it's been a learning process.”

For Hersh, the long hours and hard work are worth it, because it means she’s advocating for, and protecting, animals.

“I think that my work and this field shows us that these animals have these rich lives, and that is worthy of protecting in and of itself,” Hersh said. “Not for some service they can provide us, you know, an ecosystem service or a tourism service, but just that they have a right to live out their lives as unimpeded as possible. And I think communication can help people understand that.”

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