Yes but there's a difference between being unable to study all ant species due to a lack of resources, and being uninterested in doing so.
I expect we'll continue studying ant species with the goal of studying all of them we can (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out or ant species out before we have a chance to).
Similarly I also expect we (or an advanced alien species) would attempt to study as many other alien species as they can as well, and wouldn't stop simply because they don't want to.
We've studied 12,500 out of an estimated 22,000 so far. It's not like we've stopped and said "ok we're good, no need to study other ant species."
> being unable to study all ant species due to a lack of resources, and being uninterested in doing so.
Of course! That's my point.
Back to the alien analogy: if we believe that human-like life is as common across the universe as ants are on earth, then more-advanced aliens might well be philosophically interested in studying us, but not have yet bothered to reach us.
They might be busy "contacting" their local human-ish specieses who they see everywhere, all the time, and not think it is important to spend time contacting similar planet #12358 on the list, that's a bit further out of the way, and could take them a million years of dedicated effort.
The lack of resources devoted to the counting of ant species is a reflection of it being very uninteresting to most people. Relative to the entire universe, our world really doesn't have many places to look for ants, and we don't need to travel faster than the speed of light to find them.
This is a good supporting point. If you actually quantified the effort and resources it would take to study every species of ant it would likely be quite small although not trivially so. Yet it is still left up to the personal interests of professional biologists to lobby for research programs. It could play out similarly on a galactic scale in which case our first point of contact might be a grad student from the biology department of the local Uni.
I expect we'll continue studying ant species with the goal of studying all of them we can (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out or ant species out before we have a chance to).
Similarly I also expect we (or an advanced alien species) would attempt to study as many other alien species as they can as well, and wouldn't stop simply because they don't want to.
We've studied 12,500 out of an estimated 22,000 so far. It's not like we've stopped and said "ok we're good, no need to study other ant species."