I always enjoy the ESA Annual Meeting, and 2024 was no exception. Thank you very much to all the organizers, who did a ton of work to put #ESA2024 together.
But I didn’t enjoy quite as much as I was hoping to, because it was on the small side for an ESA meeting. Just 2920 attendees, according to ESA President Shahid Naeem in his opening remarks. Definitely not the smallest ESA meeting in recent years (that’d be Fort Lauderdale, with 2545 attendees). But well below the mid-3000 mark that’s typical for recent ESA meetings, never mind the 4500+ that you get at the biggest ESA meetings. And on a more personal level, a bunch of my friends weren’t there this year. Both professionally and personally, I didn’t get quite as much out of this year’s ESA meeting as I usually do, because it was small.
So, where is everybody?
ESA meetings fluctuate in size from year to year, for all sorts of reasons. Some locations are more popular with ESA members than others (see tomorrow’s post for more on this). Maybe Long Beach was small because it was the second year in a row the ESA met on the West Coast. Etc.
But more interestingly (and worryingly, for me personally), it seems like attendance among ecologists roughly my age and older is in long-term secular decline. A friend pointed this out to me at this year’s ESA meeting, and at first I didn’t buy it at all. Then I started running through my mental Rolodex of my friends in ecology who are around my age or older. I suddenly realized that most of them stopped regularly attending the ESA meeting years ago (“years ago” meaning pre-pandemic). No doubt each of them have their own personal reasons for no longer attending regularly. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t also a pattern here.
So what’s going on here? Is it a random idiosyncratic blip that just so happens to be showing up among my friends but nobody else’s? Or is there a pattern here? Maybe it’s always been the case that senior ecologists mostly stop attending the ESA meeting once they reach their 40s or 50s? And I’m only noticing this now that I’m in my 50s? Or maybe, as the field of ecology becomes more applied, the ESA meeting becomes a less attractive meeting for the sorts of fundamental, ideas-driven ecologists I hang out with? Or what? Lots of possible hypotheses here, which aren’t mutually exclusive.
Note that it’s not a long-term secular decline in overall ESA meeting attendance. There is no long-term secular decline in the attendance data. So if there is a pattern here, it’s a pattern specific to more senior ecologists, or some other subset of ecologists.
Note to my friends: yes, I know I’ve just opened the door to a million jokes along the lines of “Actually, we all just got sick of hanging out with you, Jeremy.” So go ahead, do your worst. 🙂
p.s. Remember back when I first started blogging, when I’d write a daily wrap-up post every day at the ESA meeting? I wrote those posts at night before going to bed. I’d get back to my hotel room at, like, 9 pm, and stay up until 11 or midnight writing a post. Man, I was an amazing blogger in 2013. Father Time is undefeated, etc.