Skip to main content
Entomology 2025 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
 
Oral Presentation
Oral Presentation
Poster Display
Poster Display
Student Competition
Student Competition
Ticketed Event
Ticketed Event

Section Symposium

Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

eDNA as a Tool for Inferring Insect Species Presence and Characterizing Communities

Targeted assay development and metabarcoding insights for detecting Bombus species on eDNA samples

Tuesday, November 11, 2025
8:50 AM - 9:05 AM Pacific
Location: Oregon Convention Center, Portland Ballroom 251, OCC
Oral Presentation
Bumblebees are crucial pollinators of commercially valuable crops as well as plant communities in natural ecosystems. Many bumblebee species are declining globally, which could diminish their ecosystem services as pollinators. Therefore, there is a continued need to assess species status, population trends, and threats to bumblebee communities and specific threatened or endangered species. Current survey methods can be inefficient, and even harmful. Capture methods (e.g., netting) can cause undue stress on bumblebees or be lethal. Further, identification of some species requires highly trained taxonomists. New DNA-based methods provide a non-invasive alternative to traditional sampling and can identify species based on available sequence databases. Here, we evaluate the usefulness of environmental DNA (eDNA) to classify bumblebee communities and detect rare taxa using the DNA they leave behind when visiting flowers. We evaluate two eDNA methods, (1) metabarcoding for multi-species analysis and (2) qPCR for targeted species detection. For metabarcoding, we collected flower samples from sites in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states and extracted eDNA deposited on flower samples. We amplified bee eDNA using a Bombus-specific primer diagnostic for most bumblebee species. For targeted detection, we designed qPCR assays for two species of conservation concern, the rusty patched bumble bee (B. affinis) and western bumble bee (B. occidentalis). We then validated the assays using field samples from known sites. Results from these two techniques will help determine the potential of using eDNA as a tool to monitor bumblebee communities and assess species of immediate concern in restored grasslands and prairies.