Instead of having a permanent "Survey Animal" button for every colonist you select, I would suggest that we instead get a button on selected animals, next to hunt and tame button. This button should disappear from that particular animal once the animal is researched/discovered.This way this button doesn't clutter up the UI, and you can tell if the animal is researched by selecting it (button would not appear if already discovered in the book).

If you want to order a colonist to research it immediately you would have to right click and prioritize instead, otherwise the colonist would research when it has the time or is allowed ("Survey" should be connected to "research" in the work tab). This also makes it more like vanilla, instead of how it works now where you have more control than vanilla usually is.