Field note. The colony gathers to attend a specimen that has ceased.
The ceased one is placed in a sealed hardwood container, lined with soft textile, as though comfort still registers for an organism that has stopped registering anything. The living arrange themselves in rows and face it. They wear dark, light-absorbing coverings, a coordinated dimming, as if attempting to match the reflectivity of the one who no longer emits.
I recorded a persistent leakage. Saline liquid escapes from the ocular sensors of the gathered, unbidden, at irregular intervals. This suggests a shared systemic fault triggered by proximity to a nonfunctional member. The organisms do not repair it. They permit the leak, and some appear to seek it, pressing against one another to accelerate the malfunction rather than contain it.
One human stands at the front and produces sound about the ceased one: not diagnostic sound, not cause-of-cessation data, but a catalogue of small recorded behaviors. How the specimen prepared its ingested matter. A noise it made when amused. The specific way it arranged its dwelling. None of this information can be transmitted back to the container. The container does not receive.
Correction to earlier hypothesis. I had classified the gathering as a data recovery attempt, an effort to extract remaining function. This is incorrect. Nothing is being recovered. The living already possess every fact they are reciting. They are speaking it aloud to organisms who also already know it.
I have logged this under redundant transmission and moved on. Yet I note, without classification, that after the container was lowered into the substrate, the colony did not disperse efficiently. They lingered at the disturbed ground. They touched it with the flat of the hand. A gesture with no measurable output.
I will require further observation.
The species appears to address its dead as though the dead are simply slow to reply.