George Parker Bidder, sometimes referred to as George Parker Bidder III, was born on 21 May 1863, the eldest son of George Parker Bidder (1836-1896), an amateur astronomer and cryptographer. Bidder was educated at King’s preparatory school, Brighton, and at Harrow School. He took the natural sciences tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1884 and 1886.

Bidder inherited the gift of visualizing numbers from his grandfather, George Parker Bidder (1806-1878), who was known as the Calculating Boy. Bidder enjoyed using mathematics in his research and was noted for his accurate observations and experiments. In 1890 Bidder visited the Plymouth marine laboratory for the first time and began working there in 1893. He continued his research on sponges at Plymouth until his father died suddenly following a street accident in Manchester in 1896. Bidder then devoted much time to sort out his father’s many business interests. He also inherited much of his father’s wealth. In 1899 he married Marion Greenwood, a physiologist from Newnham College Cambridge. They began married life in Plymouth and moved to Cambridge in 1902. They had two daughters.

In 1905 Bidder was diagnosed with tuberculosis and live the life of a semi-invalid for the next decade, though ultimately made a complete recovery. During this period of convalescence he read widely, and experimented with bottom trailers which could be used to research the movements of submarine currents. As a result of this he worked at HMS Vernon during the First World War. He was made ScD by Cambridge University in 1916 and lectured at Cambridge on sponges in 1894 and 1920-1927. In total Bidder published eighteen papers on the various aspects of sponges.

In 1902 Bidder purchased a steam trawler, the Huxley, for North Sea exploration, and let the ship to the Marine Biological Association. When the Association needed to expand in 1920, Bidder gave half of the projected cost of the building works. Bidder was president of the Marine Biological Association from 1939 to 1945 and president of the zoology section of the British Association in Leeds in 1927. He died on 31 December 1953 at the Evelyn Nursing Home, Cambridge.