Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.
so I often think of Charles Sheffield novels when I look for examples of really creative alien design… and he had at least one example of a species like this– the Coromar (caterpillary alien) and the Maricore (what it metamorphosed into)
but they appeared only in one small scene as semi-relevant background characters who helped the main characters while they explored a planet
And his tendency toward bizarre plotholes in linguistics always detracted from his amazing creativity in alien biology.
for example, the Coromar was only able to communicate through high-pitched shrieking. The exploration team only learned about their life cycle because they had an expert translator who was able to learn languages very quickly (the translator was also a very creatively designed alien, a hivemind swarm of little hummingbird-like creatures that could spread out for reconnaissance but got smarter and more capable of conscious thought the more of them were together)
…and this translator, somehow, translated some of that otherwise incomprehensible high-pitched shrieking into the names “Coromar” and “Maricore.” How? Where did those names come from? Why? I just… no.
(He’s also got an insectoid species, the Cecropians, whose language consists entirely of pheromone smells. Presumably the species name was given by humans, from the same origin as the Cecropia moth– that’s not a problem to me. But the main Cecropian who’s a character in his books is named Atvar H'sial. To my knowledge, it is never explained how she got that name, or what language it’s supposed to be in. Definitely not her language! Translation doesn’t work that way!)
(Same as Spock mind-melding with the acid-secreting rock-creature that has no apparent means of speaking any humanoid language, and deduced that it was called a Horta. where did you get that, Spock. What kind of liberties are you taking here. Did it tell you it was, like, the Gardener of the Great Underground Rock Gardens, and you translated that into the root word of “horticulture,” or what? Language is always the weak point in my suspenders of disbelief, authors gotta step up their game)