Origin and early development of the International Bryozoology Association

The International Bryozoology Association (IBA) was founded in May 1965 at the conclusion of a conference on the post-Paieozoic Bryozoa of the North Sea region, held in Sweden at the Geological Institute of Stockholm University. Sixteen of the participants in that conference, E. Arinosela, O. Berthelsen, R.S. Boardman, G. Braga, A.H. Cheetham, P.L. Cook, Y.-V. Guatier, M, Labracherie, R. Lagaaij, G.P. Larwood, A.W. Medd, J. Prud’homme, S. Schager, L. Silén, N. Spjeldnaes, and E. Voigt, became the Association’s first members, Motivated by a spirit of internationalism that pervaded the proliferation of new scholarly societies in the two decades following World War II, IB A s founders sought to establish an organization that would promote the exchange of information, ideas, and techniques among bryozoologists of all nations. The first duty of the newly chosen chairman (Cheetham) and secretary (Cook) was to initiate plans for the first IBA conference, targeted for 1968 at a venue that we judged likely to maximize participation in terms of both attendees and countries represented. One consideration in deciding the venue was the likelihood that proximity (in time and place) to an International Geological Congress (IGC) or International Congress of Zoology (ICZ) might increase the chances that either paleobiologists or biologists would obtain travel funding. This also influenced our planning a triennial cycle for the IBA conferences, some of which would fall in IGC years and others in ICZ years. The IBA’s first conference, at the laboratorssies of the petroleum company AGIP in San Donato Milanese, Italy, was held in August 1968, just before the IGC meeting in Prague. Although 46 bryozoologists from 14 countries attended, participation by 17 others from three countries, including all of those from the Soviet Union, was cut short as the military action ending the “Prague Spring” got underway. Proximity to the Prague IGC, however, did seem to result in a representation of paleobiological papers unequaled at any of the IBA’s next ten conferences (through 1998). Efforts by the succeeding IBA officers (Spjeldnaes and Cook) to gain formal international standing for the IBA, through affiliation with the International Union of Biological Sciences and the International Geological Union, were rewarded with the attendance of three of our colleagues from the Soviet Union at the IBA’s second conference, at the University of Durham, England, in September 1971. However, by the time of the third conference (September 1974 at the Université Claude Bernard in Villeurbanne, France), participation of our colleagues from the Soviet Union was again cancelled, perhaps because of renewed international tensions. As a further step toward formalizing the organization of the IBA and its relationship to other scholarly societies, participants in the 1974 conference adopted a constitution, thus ending nearly a decade of efforts to keep the IBA as informal as possible. Despite yielding to the necessity for this degree of formality, the Association avoided other proposals, such as publishing a taxon-specific journal, changing its name to accommodate taxonomic usage, or obtaining funding to bring particular groups of bryozoologists to the conferences, any of which could have constrained the inclusiveness and internationalism of the organization. Although the IBA’s purpose was simply to bring bryozoologists into dialogue rather than to affect the direction of their research, anecdotal evidence suggests that since its founding, bryozoology has undergone a synergism resulting from a new level of understanding between biologists and paleobiologists, thus “putting a human face” on researchers who had previously worked in isolation. A more analytical approach to this question, however, remains to be undertaken.