Taylor Hersh taking a photo while doing field work on an unrelated project near Dominica. Photo by Ellen Jacobs.
Oregon State University researcher Taylor Hersh has been named one of five women in science awardees by L’Oreal USA for 2024, a recognition that also comes with a $60,000 grant to pursue further research and public engagement.
(Watch the video L'Oreal produced about Hersh's work.)
Hersh studies the vocalizations of bowhead whales in the Arctic, analyzing their complex songs to determine how many different types of songs they sing and how long each song lasts before being replaced.
Two bowhead whales surface in a small gap in the ice. Photo by Kate Stafford, Marine Mammal Institute.
She is a postdoctoral scholar at the Marine Mammal Institute at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, where she works in two research groups: LABIRINTO, the Lab for Animal Behavioral Interaction Research in the Ocean with Mauricio Cantor and the Marine Mammal Bioacoustics and Ecology Lab with Kate Stafford.
“They both really supported me in my application and helped me figure out what project to submit. It definitely felt like a long shot at the time, but we thought it doesn’t hurt to apply,” Hersh said.
Before she applied, she wasn’t sure her work was a good fit, but this year’s awardees study everything from blood vessels in the brain to auroras on Mars.
“Don’t count yourself out before you even apply,” Hersh said. “That’s a problem for a lot of women, so that would be my one piece of advice.”
Hersh and fellow researchers doing field work for an unrelated project on dolphins in Brazil, using a hydrophone array to record dolphin noises underwater.
Part of Hersh’s grant money will go toward paying her salary and to pay the undergraduate student who is helping her analyze recordings of bowhead whale songs. It will also help her go to the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in January to present some of her work.
The public outreach component of her project involves a childhood friend, Molly Joyce, who went on to become a Julliard-trained musician and composer. Hersh will collaborate with her on a musical piece highlighting bowhead whale song.
Bowhead whales are the jazz singers of the marine mammal world, Hersh says. Their vocalizations are among the most complex of any mammal singer, with a large and rapidly changing repertoire of songs. They can even do two-voiced singing, similar to human throat-singing in various Indigenous cultures around the world, where they sing two different notes at the same time.
A previous study from Stafford’s lab found that in the span of three years, the group of bowheads they were studying sang more than 180 different song types, sometimes sticking with one for just a couple of hours or days before moving on to a new song. Hersh is excited to find out whether the same patterns occur in the subpopulation of whales she’s studying.
The whales themselves are also special, Hersh said.
“If you were looking at the yearbook of all whales and dolphins and porpoises and you went to the superlatives, bowhead whales win all the things,” she said. “They have the longest baleen, the thickest blubber, they’re the longest-lived — they can live to be more than 200 years old. And they can live in the packed ice of the Arctic: They have this hump on their head, which they use to push through the ice to create breathing holes.”
The L’Oreal grant will help Hersh share more about these unique creatures and the dangers they’re facing due to climate change. The decrease in sea ice means more vessels in the Arctic, increasing the risk of ship strikes, pollution and manmade noise; and warming waters can affect bowhead prey distribution and competition from other predators. The changing climate also means other whale species are moving into the bowheads’ territory, potentially adding more noise to the environment.
“These animals live in the Arctic; most people, myself included, have never seen one. It’s important to raise awareness about this animal and what’s happening in the Arctic — the poles are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet,” she said. “Climate change starts to feel real when people see polar bears on small bits of ice, so I think bowhead whales can help people get a fuller picture of how climate change is causing underwater change, too.”
