In addition to being more understandable than the variance as a measure of the amount of variation in the data, the standard deviation summarizes how close observations are to the mean in an understandable way. Many variables in biology fit the normal probability distribution fairly well. If a variable fits the normal distribution, 68.3% (or roughly two-thirds) of the values are within one standard deviation of the mean, 95.4% are within two standard deviations of the mean, and 99.7 (or almost all) are within 3 standard deviations of the mean. Thus if someone says the mean length of men's feet is 270 mm with a standard deviation of 13 mm, you know that about two-thirds of men's feet are between 257 and 283 mm long, and about 95% of men's feet are between 244 and 296 mm long. Here's a histogram that illustrates this: