Ent Soc 2025: Portland

In early November, five members of the Bernauer lab headed to Portland, OR, to present at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America meeting. For all of us, this was our first visit to the Pacific Northwest, and we were excited to visit a new state!

On Saturday, we woke up (very) early to head to the airport in Minneapolis where we quickly began running into other conference goers (the giveaways were insect-inspired apparel and/or seeing a poster tube being carried around…). Once we arrived in Portland, we were all pleased that the weather was uncharacteristically sunny and warmer than the chilly Midwest we had left behind. Taking full advantage of the sun, we spent the afternoon expanding our culinary experiences at Din Tai Fung (the green beans and the chocolate mochi xiao long bao were drool-worthy), walking through Portland’s downtown, and checking out the enormity that is Powell’s books. We registered for the conference and familiarized ourselves with the (gigantic) conference center before having dinner and heading to bed (that two hour time change paired with early travel did me in). 

Exploring Portland!

Sunday morning we ventured to the first day of the conference, which was buzzing with the excited and nervous energy of thousands of entomologists! On Monday morning, Laura and Jensen presented back-to-back talks in the undergraduate student competition on their Biology Research Scholars Program (BRSP) research on cranberry pollination. Jensen talked about patterns in buzz pollination across bumble bee species and flower age and Laura talked about different patterns observed in foraging between honey and bumble bees, finding that bumble bees forage for pollen more often and visit more flowers per minute, regardless of temperature. Later on, Kinsley and Orlean presented their poster summarizing the abundance and diversity of bumble bees in Eau Claire, which included 12 sightings of the federally endangered rusty patched bumble bee! (See their blog post for more details!)

On Tuesday, Jensen, Laura, Kinsley, and Orlean rented a car for their first time and headed toward the coast with a short detour into Washington (two new states in one trip!) for the day! Meanwhile, I had a nice lunch networking with other early career faculty members, then presented a poster summarizing a systematic review of cranberry pollination that I’ve been working on with collaborators at UW-Madison. Later that night, we all attended the student awards ceremony, where we learned that Jensen won second place for her talk on buzz pollination!! We were all extremely excited for Jensen and for me, as a mentor, this was one of the highlights of my career!

Jensen on the winner's podium for her awesome talk on buzz pollination in cranberry!

And with that, our time in Portland came to an end. I caught a red-eye flight back to Minneapolis where I glimpsed the northern lights before sleeping through the rest of the flight. We landed a bit early and I was able to get back to Eau Claire and get a nap in before teaching class later that day. The four students returned later Wednesday morning. Overall, an extremely enjoyable and successful conference and I left feeling refreshed, inspired, and deeply proud to work with such amazing scientists!