Comment by teiferer

From a purely utilitariatic POV, understanding your environment helps avoiding mistakes that mess it up which then indirectly impacts you too since you depend on your environment. So, more understanding improves policy making.

Second, what people know is often valued more. If you can tell people about the environment then you can create a fascination and make them value their surroundings more, maybe causing them to think twice before dumping trash mindlessly in the forest or voting for the next guy who wants to expand fracking operations. And in order to tell them, you first need to understand it.

Third, it can give you material for creating useful tools or medicine which then improves lives, like vaccines or airplanes (which we wouldn't have without curiosity about birds).

Apart from that, it's empathy too. Animals can suffer and causing them suffering is usually against empathy people feel. More understanding helps with that. (It's not too long ago that the prevailing view of "that's just a fish, they don't feel anything, so I can eat them even though I'm vegetarian" was challenged and slowy overturned.)

And finally, beauty. Nature is just beautiful. Compared to a dead rock like mars, it's absolutely amazing what we have around us.

I hope these five reasons give you some perspective as a biology student.

I wonder, what made you choose that field of study?