Chris Grinter was a kid in suburban Chicago when he first noticed the butterflies. Not the grand gesture of noticing them—just the quiet curiosity of watching them drift through his backyard and wondering what they were called. That small question never really left him.
Today, as senior collection manager of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, Grinter oversees one of the world's largest insect archives. But the path from backyard butterfly-watcher to curator of hundreds of thousands of specimens wasn't inevitable. A visit to Chicago's Field Museum as a teenager changed something. "I had my mind blown," he recalls. After that, he started volunteering—labeling, databasing, joining field expeditions. The work stuck.
What Grinter discovered along the way is that butterflies are just the visible edge of a much larger world. Moths alone outnumber them roughly 15 to 1. Walk through almost any California city garden and you'll find species that science has never formally documented. This realization became the driving force behind CalATBI—the California All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory—an audacious project to document every insect species in the state before they disappear.
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When CalATBI launched, Grinter's team led the fieldwork across the state, collecting hundreds of thousands of insects across tens of thousands of miles. The scale of exploration was something California hadn't seen in decades. There were discoveries—plenty of them. There were also mishaps, like the time their van got stuck in Mojave Desert sand and they kept sampling in 38°C heat anyway, because the work mattered more than the discomfort.
What makes Grinter's work significant isn't just the specimens preserved in glass cases. It's that CalATBI represents something larger: a deliberate choice to know what we have before it's gone. The California Academy of Sciences frames their mission as regenerating the natural world through research, education, and engagement. For Grinter, that means the meticulous work of preservation—not just of insects, but of the knowledge that makes conservation possible.
As California's ecosystems face mounting pressure, having a complete inventory of its insect life becomes something closer to essential. You can't protect what you don't know exists.
