How the Society Began

The Acarological Society of America was founded in 1970, when eighty acarologists met during the entomology meetings in Miami and voted to establish a society of their own.

It started with one acarologist and a stack of letters. In 1968, Dr. Fareed Saba was working as an acarologist and entomologist at the Vero Beach laboratories in Florida, then a Bayer subsidiary. Acarology in North America at the time had no organization of its own. Acarologists met under the banner of entomology, or not at all. The following year he began writing to colleagues to ask whether that ought to change.

The replies came back encouraging, and two carried particular weight. Professor Bruce Boudreaux of Louisiana State University and Ron Sinha of the Canada Department of Agriculture in Winnipeg both lent their support, giving the proposal standing on both sides of the border.

By the end of 1969 Dr. Saba had mailed more than 200 invitations to acarologists and entomologists across the continent, asking them to gather during the following year’s entomology meetings to discuss forming a society. Roughly eighty people came to that meeting in Miami in November 1970, a substantial turnout for a discipline that had never assembled on its own account. There they voted to establish the Acarological Society of America. A board was elected to draft the founding documents, and he was among its members.

However, Dr. Saba’s service was brief. In 1971 Bayer transferred him to Morocco to head the entomology department at the ministry of agriculture through the German aid program. Having left the country, he resigned from the board; it accepted his resignation and named him an honorary life member of the society he had convened.

This account comes from a letter written to the Society by Dr. Fareed Saba and is preserved in the ASA archives.