San Juan hosts marine mammal scientists’ first biennial conference in Latin America

More than 1,600 people registered for the 26th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, held from October 19 to 23, 2026, at the Centro de Convenciones Pedro Rosselló González in San Juan, according to conference co-chair Antonio Mignucci. The marine mammal conference in Puerto Rico was the first time the Society for Marine Mammalogy held its biennial meeting in Latin America in its more than 50-year history.

The society, which describes itself as the world’s largest international organization dedicated to marine mammal science, has more than 2,000 members from 56 countries and publishes the peer-reviewed journal Marine Mammal Science. Its program in San Juan included more than 1,000 presentations across ten research themes, from acoustics and communication to health and contaminants, human interactions, and emerging technologies, along with pre-conference workshops on October 17 and 18. Mignucci said participants came from more than 77 countries.

The meeting’s theme was “One Ocean, One Future: Advancing Marine Mammal Science for Ecosystem Health.” Research on the program examined how climate change and marine heatwaves are reshaping populations, how pollutants affect animal health, and how artificial intelligence and other tools are changing the way scientists study animals at sea.

Why the marine mammal conference came to Puerto Rico

The society’s president, Jeremy Kiszka, framed the choice as part of its international mission. “By bringing our conference to Puerto Rico for the first time, we’re not only celebrating the extraordinary growth of marine mammal science across Latin America; we’re creating new opportunities for researchers from around the world to work together on the challenges facing our oceans,” he said in an August announcement.

Mignucci, who directs the Caribbean Manatee Conservation Center, called it in the same announcement “a defining moment not only for our island but for the entire Caribbean and Latin America.” During the conference, he told EyBoricua that students presenting their work for the first time and the Latin American presence stood out, and that the meeting let researchers exchange ideas on species such as manatees and humpback whales. Meteorologist Deborah Martorell told the outlet that location matters, since travel to distant scientific meetings can limit who participates.

The islands’ own conditions were also part of the planning. Puerto Rico entered August under a water-rationing plan after the driest July on record for San Juan. In September, organizers reported that rainfall had improved conditions at the Carraízo Reservoir and that the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority had suspended rationing for customers supplied by the reservoir, and they confirmed the conference would proceed as planned.

Manatees at the center

Manatees, which live in Puerto Rico’s coastal waters, were a recurring focus. In his plenary, retired United States Geological Survey biologist Bob Bonde, who has studied manatees for 47 years, reviewed the history of their conservation. His abstract noted that “injuries and deaths due to encounters with boats continue to rise in Florida and Puerto Rico,” and that hunting pressure persists in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa.

That pattern is familiar at the Caribbean Manatee Conservation Center, on the Bayamón campus of the Inter American University of Puerto Rico, which attendees toured. “Among the most common reasons these animals come here, to the Manatee Conservation Center, is collisions with watercraft, including boats and jet skis,” Paula González, an educator at the center, told WAPA. “A little more than 80% of all our cases have been orphaned manatees, which could be due to natural causes,” she added.

The center was founded in 2009 in collaboration with the Red Caribeña de Varamientos, and it works on rescue, rehabilitation, veterinary care, research, and education, EyBoricua reported, citing the university. At the time of the interview, Mignucci said the center was caring for four manatees, two of which were expected to be released in January 2027. He also said visiting scientists saw manatees, including mothers with calves, in the Condado Lagoon.

Threats to the animals in San Juan’s waters have drawn concern before. When federally backed dredging of San Juan Bay began in 2024, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, said the project could harm manatees by removing seagrass and increasing ship traffic.

A Puerto Rican paleontologist on the plenary stage

The final plenary went to Jorge Vélez-Juarbe, a paleontologist from Isabela and associate curator of marine mammals at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who trained in geology at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, EyBoricua reported. His talk traced about 45 million years of evolution of sirenians, the group that includes manatees and dugongs, drawing on fossils from the eastern US, California, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Peru.

The oldest sirenian finds, from Jamaica, belong to early animals that could still move on land, WAPA reported. In Puerto Rico, finds of skulls, teeth, vertebrae, and ribs have been key to studying that transformation, and the islands’ karst region holds a substantial part of that fossil heritage. “In those rocks lies the prehistory of Puerto Rico,” Vélez-Juarbe said.

New findings presented in San Juan

The conference is where much of the field’s new work first appears. “This conference is where people present the newest results and ideas before they’re published,” said Lisa Ballance, director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute and president-elect of the society’s board. Oregon State sent nearly 50 researchers and staff to San Juan.

Among them was Kurt Williams, director of the Oregon Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, who presented his findings on a young humpback whale that stranded alive near Yachats, Oregon, in November 2025, tangled in crab gear. Though the whale was only about two years old, Williams found “extremely severe” chronic inflammation of the intestine, largely driven by parasites, along with evidence of congestive heart failure and chronic spinal cord disease. “What we found was the animal had pre-existing diseases which, in my opinion, contributed to it coming into shallower water, ultimately getting tangled up in crab gear and stranding,” he said. Oregon State’s researchers also presented work on unusual mortality events among gray whales, Arctic acoustic studies showing whale species shifting their ranges, cooperation between dolphins and humans, stress hormones recorded in teeth, and the use of drones to observe whale behavior never seen before in the wild.

The week’s other plenaries covered the evolution of toothed whale communication, presented by Laura May-Collado; mentorship and the future of conservation in South America, by Joanna Alfaro; and Mexican seals and sea lions as sentinels of environmental change, by Fernando Elorriaga-Verplancken. The conference closed with the society’s award presentations, including a talk by Sue E. Moore, recipient of the 2026 Kenneth S. Norris Lifetime Achievement Award, titled “Chasing inter-species communication: what marine mammals are telling us about our oceans,” and a presentation by Bridgette O’Shannessy on three decades of research on the recovery of southern right whales in Australian waters.

The next biennial conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, in 2028, hosted for the first time by Oregon State’s Marine Mammal Institute.