Rudolf H. T. Mattoni

1927 - 2022

October 6, 1927 - January 3, 2022 Rudolf H. T. (Rudi) Mattoni died January 3, 2022, in New York City following a stroke on Christmas morning. Rudi was born October 6, 1927, at home in Venice, CA (on a canal, as he liked to point out), the only child of Elvira (Kressling) and Andre von Mattoni. He filled his remarkable 94 years with a deep love of and curiosity about the natural world with a particular emphasis on the role of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) as indicators for the health of the overall environment. He was a renowned expert on Lycaenids (blue butterflies), and longtime editor of The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera.
Raised by a single mother and her immigrant parents in Beverly Hills during the Great Depression (his mother's philosophy was "if you're going to be poor, you might as well be poor in Beverly Hills"), Rudi first developed his interest in the natural world as a child by exploring the relative wildness of pre-war west Los Angeles which still had avocado and citrus orchards as well as large tracts of undeveloped land. As his passion for butterflies grew, teenage Rudi would ride the streetcar downtown to the LA County Natural History Museum to learn from the staff scientists there. After graduating from Beverly Hills High School and serving a brief stint in the United States Army immediately following the end of World War II, Rudi pursued his study of insects further, receiving an undergraduate degree in Entomology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate in Population Genetics from UCLA where he studied fruit flies.
Rudi's diverse and extensive career as a serial entrepreneur revolved around applying his scientific interests to business. When he was only 20 years old, he founded BioQuip Products, a still vibrant provider (under different ownership) of equipment and supplies to the entomological community. While in graduate school he became a real estate investor; together with his wife Diana and his mother, they remodeled and sold "fixer uppers." In his later years he built several homes and two apartment complexes. After graduate school he was one of the Principal Investigators on NASA's BioSatellite 2 mission, first working for North American Aviation and then founding the Biological Systems Division within NUS Corporation.
Following his marriage to Leona, they owned and operated, with other family members, several successful businesses: Agri Science Laboratories, one of the first analytical testing laboratories to perform redundancy analyses for food labeling, International Microbiological Products, which produced spawn for commercial mushroom growers, and Agresearch, which mass-reared cotton pink bollworms for the USDA sterile release program in the San Joaquin Valley, a crucial part of the effort to eliminate this cotton pest. Rudi later segued Agresearch into habitat restoration, where its most notable work was the restoration of the El Segundo Dunes at LAX, including rearing and releasing endangered El Segundo Blue butterflies. Rudi was also heavily involved in restoring the native habitat of the Palos Verdes Blue butterfly at the Navy's San Pedro Defense Fuel Supply Point following his 1994 rediscovery there of this endangered species which had previously been believed extinct since 1983. At the end of his career, Rudi returned to academia as a lecturer in UCLA's Department of Geography, teaching a popular undergraduate course on Biodiversity and advising graduate and undergraduate students on research projects.
In addition to his passion for butterflies and the environment, Rudi had a deep interest in the arts. He was a board member of the Long Beach Opera, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Royce 270 (the support group at the time for UCLA's Center for the Performing Arts) where he also served as president for two years. In later life, Rudi also became involved in producing art along the art-science boundary, specifically with the goal of using art to interest people in environmental issues. In 2009 he collaborated with curator Micaela Patania to produce the Poor Butterfly exhibit in Buenos Aires. In 2014 he collaborated with artist Paul Villinski on his 2014 Paradigm show at the Morgan Lehman gallery in New York. In 2018 he participated in the St. Petersburg Art Residency in Russia, presenting a performance art piece on the art and science of butterflies.
To the end, Rudi remained deeply concerned about the ongoing destruction of the environment, the loss of biodiversity and the negative impacts of human-caused climate change. In recent years he expressed several times that his most fervent regret was that he wouldn't "get to see how it all ends." He remained firmly of the conviction that "it's only going to get worse." While his passing certainly supports that contention for each of us personally, let's honor Rudi's memory and work to disprove it globally by helping the world to address the problems that so keenly concerned him.
In addition to his wife, Leona, he is survived by sons Nicholas (Laura), Adriano, Carlo (Rebecca), four grandchildren, Sierra (Ryan) Meyers, Henry, Leo and Samuel Mattoni, and two great granddaughters, Ella and Kelsea Meyers.
He will be greatly missed by his many friends both personal and in the scientific community and by all members of his family. A virtual memorial service for his worldwide network of friends and a private graveside internment of his ashes will be held later.