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.
