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).
What do you consider worth preserving?
Does the fact that humans introduced rats into the ecosystem that wiped them out count for anything to you?
(Are rats the invisible hand of the market or something?)
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?
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.
Well I'm glad I got the opportunity to chat with you sir, and your smarts shut me down. I'll shut up now.
Let me know when I can talk, and in the meantime
I'm quite confused, first you say you want to discuss, but then you get all snarky and dismissive on me without going into the substance of the discussion. If there are any rational reasons to want to preserve as many species as possible, I'd like to be convinced. I was just pointing out that your arguments weren't phrased consistently, and then went on to explain my interpretation of what you were trying to say, so as to not get stuck in pedanticism or requiring too much thought into what is, after all, an informal discussion. I'm just trying to make my interpretations of your words explicit by way of explaining the process that led to them, yet you seem to interpret it as an ad hominem.
I can't speak for the OP, obviously, but I'm in favor of preserving particular states of nature for essentially aesthetic reasons: I want to keep a copy around for when evolution moves on and species change niches or go extinct. I like keeping track of the information, too.
I won't pretend that's "natural" though. If it's anything it's pretty explicitly anti-natural. I wouldn't necessarily recommend reintroducing them into their original environment either, unless said reintroduction wasn't disruptive (to either the environment or the locals).
Some species also need to be kept around for reasons of ecosystem integrity (system being the operative word there), but these particular insects don't appear to fall under that heading.
Thus there's a couple of drivers here. People want to undo past mistakes. Maybe this is misplaced, maybe "we" should be concentrating on avoiding this happening again. The science is interesting. There's a bunch of different disciplines that could be involved here. A hero animal (the huge bug is both cute and horrifying) always gets attention.
The big difference is that humans didn't wipe out wooly mammoths. Also, they are huge and they would be hard to provide enough land for. (I'm not sure how climate change would affect them; what lands and climate do you need for viable herds of mammoth?)
[1] But see the Northern Hairy Nose Wombat. Most people haven't heard of this, yet there are only about 70 left alive.