He founded the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory (KBMML) in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1970 to study bottlenose dolphin perception, cognition, and communication.
Pack and Herman (1995) demonstrated the bottlenosed dolphin's ability to recognize the shapes of novel objects across the senses of echolocation and vision.
In 1975, Herman pioneered the scientific study of the annual winter migration of humpback whales into Hawaiian waters, focusing on distribution, abundance, behavior, social organization, song, and individual life histories.
In 1985, an errant humpback whale, dubbed "Humphrey" by national television media, swam up the Sacramento River in California from San Francisco Bay.
Herman's idea was to lure it out by playing acoustic recordings of vocalizations from the whales' summer feeding grounds in Alaska.
Herman et al. (1989) demonstrated the dolphin's equivalent ability in matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks in both the acoustic and visual domains.
Pack and Herman (1995) explored cross-modal matching of objects between echolocation and vision, and did not report differential performance ability when comparing the visual-to-echoic and echoic-to-visual directions.