Empirically? Observationally? Yes.

Until we have empirical evidence to the contrary we need to preserve our species.

If we discover other smarter species or never do, either way I don't care, it's immaterial to the precautionary principle.

We are fucking awesome and rare, and any other species with our amount of meaning generation or even capability for meaning generation is also fucking awesome.

I would 100% grant that ceatacenas and octopuses have human or higher level intelligence, I don't care, I don't need to put other species capabilities down to highlight my species accomplishment, the simple fact is that we have written more facts about the universe, discovered more, done more, gone further than any species we have empirically observed.

I mean it's incontrovertibly true, maybe dolphins have crazy libraries I'm not aware of, but until we verify that fact we need to preserve ourselves (and afterwards too), and we should preserve them too.

Even with other species, aliens, etc, they all need to be preserved because we can't ex ante predict which entities within a species will be part of the causal chain that solves entropy (if it's even possible.)