This seems to me like a case of empathy gone awry. All that work and effort to bring back a species of insects? There is no balance to preserve; they've been gone for almost a century. Those resources could be spent preserving human life.
For this particular species of insect however, having the last 24 remaining individuals of the entire species (presumably) be dependent on a single small shrubbery makes me think the effort put into this rescue was more than warranted.
Specially considering their extinction was (indirectly) our fault and a mistake that could have been prevented with better education and oversight on who and what was brought along during our travels. Had their extinction been an entirely natural process, I might have agreed that their rescue would not have been such a high priority.
Of course there is the question of us disturbing ecological balance somewhere is natural or not. We are after all natural beings ourselves. Whether we are intelligent or not and have the capacity to reason about our actions is irrelevant in a strictly biological sense. But this discussion opens up a whole different can of worms.
edit: Fixed some grammar.
On the scale of human activities to cease, preservation of an insect species isn't something I would stop. There are much more fruitful candidates.
When we can duplicate those results in an hour on a desktop PC, I'll agree with you. I'm not holding my breath.
There is no reason to believe that this is an optimum. (That is, an optimum for its environment, or any extant environment. Since, of course, a very wide range of possible forms are optimal for SOME environment, like the environment with a mad god that kills all life forms that do not exactly match XYZ, but that sort of reasoning is obviously just silly). Anyway, blethering aside, my point here is that if you think existing species are at all likely to be "optimal" in any meaningful sense, you have likely misunderstood evolution.
Also I'm going to drop back to an argument I hold near and dear. Lots of people are terrible, they hurt other people for their own gain. We start wars just because someone doesn't believe the same things as ourselves. We go out of our way to put others down with words just because we think that since words can't hurt then it must be okay to say whatever. All in all it's rather sad that a human being which is supposed to be superior to all other forms of life doesn't have the empathy to want to fix a problem we made for these animals in the first place. Call me crazy but as a human I'd like to leave things in a better state then they were in when I got here.
Or because of their large size, we could farm and grow them as alternative food source?
Possibilities!
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_...
Unfortunately, it requires a subscription to read now.
Actually, it's probably not bad, and bugs can be very efficient to farm.
Also, consider this, we are not messing with any balances or natural orders. We are in fact fixing a problem that we caused when we brought the black rats over in the first place.
Also both people and black rats are overpopulating this planet.
We all have hobbies and passions.