Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years

Are you really against (re)introducing woolly mammoths?! I, for one, think they would be lovely pets!

I'm not for or against reintroducing things per se, just that there seems to be an implied urgency in reintroduction which I don't understand where it comes from.

Maybe re-introducing a mammoth would be cool as a tourist attraction. I don't care much for it, but if others want to do it, great for them (but don't make governments pay for it, obviously).

Well, then why don't you tell why we should preserver them rather than downvoting me? And no I don't see why humans introducing rats matters. Is this some sort of collective guilt, 'reparations' sort of thing? To whose benefit? These insects don't know if there are 10 or 10 million of them, and they don't know if when they die, they will be the last of their species. And if they are, what does it matter? Is there moral superiority in having as many species as possible? Why?

Firstly, I apologise for downvoting you. Unnecessary, and somewhat spiteful.

I'm guessing in advance that we're going to have to agree to disagree, or more likely, this conversation will peter out unfinished, but I'll have a go at explaining my position.

The Earth is a finite enclosed ecosystem to all intents and purposes. Humans have existed for a small fraction of time compared to the entire life of the planet. In a few short centuries, we've unified all ecosystems under the one ubiquitous umbrella.

For scientific reasons, isolated species such as these should be preserved. To study, inform and provide living examples of the diversity of life that existed before the ubiquity of modern human civilisation eradicated so much.

The religious right in the US would like us to believe in Noah's Ark rather than evolution. Creatures such as these... adapted in an isolated island to grow fat and large, without competition from mammalian predators on connected land-masses, shine a light on Darwinian evolution.

And from a purely 'awwww' perspective (and if you don't think that counts for anything, you're a robot), these critters kept many to hundreds to hundreds-of-thousands of years of generations going and survived in a single outcrop of rock against all odds. Fucking evolutionary heroes if you ask me.

Sentimentality aside...

We're now the dominant life-form on earth. We're looking for microbial life under two miles of ice in the Antarctic in Lake Vladivostok. We're sending rovers to Mars looking for microbial life.

We've GOT A FUCKING ALIEN-LIKE SPECIES LIVING ON AN OCEAN OUTCROP HERE ON EARTH.

A complex, beautiful, rare insect (did you watch the hatching vid?)... and you wonder why it's worth keeping it around?

"For scientific reasons, isolated species such as these should be preserved. To study, inform and provide living examples of the diversity of life that existed before the ubiquity of modern human civilisation eradicated so much."

These are two contradictory statements in one statement. Either we preserve, in which case there is no 'before' in your sentence (because there is no eradication), or we don't, and we document what once existed. I'll interpret your intent as being 'we should preserve all species so that we can study them and let people know about them'. But then again the question becomes 'why'. Not everything is worthy of study or preservation. With several millions of different species of insects alone, some just being random mutations of others, why should we exhaustively catalog all of them? They are just the result of randomness, we ended up where we are out of stochasticity. What is the underlying reason to preserve a random state of nature? Change is natural, things come and go, so do species - nothing out of the ordinary about it.

"Creatures such as these... adapted in an isolated island to grow fat and large, without competition from mammalian predators on connected land-masses, shine a light on Darwinian evolution."

Please tell what they tell us, or might tell us, that we don't know yet, and what we can learn from them that requires a full reintroduction into existing ecosystems of them.

"And from a purely 'awwww' perspective"

Ignoring the ad hominem fallacious reasoning, they have nothing that makes them so special that only they could survive these circumstance and that we can learn from; just a dumb coming together of circumstances, survivor bias.

"We've GOT A FUCKING ALIEN-LIKE SPECIES LIVING ON AN OCEAN OUTCROP HERE ON EARTH."

Here I'm losing you completely. What is 'alien-like' about them, except from having the same color as the antagonist in the 'alien' movie series? They're just big bugs, so what? I seems like you're trying to say that because they look like something movie producers imagined hostile alien life forms would look like, that that makes them worthy of special treatment? Why would you put such value into something - just because it looks like a CGI effect from a Hollywood movie?

"A complex, beautiful, rare insect (did you watch the hatching vid?)... and you wonder why it's worth keeping it around?"

None of the things you mention in the first part of your sentence indicate in any way why one would expend effort at keeping it, it all falls back on circular reasoning and 'because it's unique'. Not everything that is unique is worth keeping. I have a broken pencil here on my desk that is in its shape statistically very likely to be unique in the whole world. I'll still throw it away.