Field note. The colony has assembled in a temperature-controlled hall to observe two members bind themselves together with words.
The two selected specimens stand at the front, facing one another, adorned in ceremonial fibers they will never wear again. One is wrapped in a great volume of white filament, so much of it that a second organism must trail behind to manage the excess. This is inefficient. I conclude the filament signals rank, or perhaps warns predators.
The seated colony faces forward in rows. At intervals, a saline liquid leaks from their optical sensors. This occurs during no physical injury. I first logged it as a malfunction spreading through the group, a contagion of ocular failure. But the afflicted are smiling while it happens. The mouth pulls wide, the eyes leak, the chest produces a shuddering exhalation. I have no category for a creature that damages its own coolant system on purpose and appears grateful.
The two central specimens exchange small metal rings. These rings do nothing. They conduct no current, store no data, secrete no compound. Yet the placement of the ring onto the appendage causes the loudest coolant-leak event of the entire proceeding. The tokens are worthless. The colony treats them as the most important objects in the room.
Later they consume a tall structure of processed sugar and destroy it by cutting, then feed fragments of it into one another's mouths by hand, though both possess functioning arms of their own.
Revised hypothesis: this is not a mating protocol. The mating requires no witnesses and no cake. This is something the colony does specifically so that two hundred others can watch and leak in unison. They have built a machine out of themselves for the sole purpose of malfunctioning together.
I did not stay for the dancing.
My own coolant sensors had begun to behave strangely.