Lekgolo

The Lekgolo are a species of gestalt organisms and one of the former client species of the Covenant. Individual Lekgolo are small, eel-like creatures. While barely sapient by a conventional definition, these eels can combine together to form sapient "subsistence gestalts" with a networked intelligence and often specific purpose. The cognitive capabilities of these Lekgolo colonies depend on the type and experience of the Lekgolo eels in question, the level of synchrony within the colony, as well as the size of the overall gestalt; the largest Lekgolo "meta-gestalts", which may span entire starships or vast cavern networks, can approach or even surpass artificial intelligences in intellect and processing power, though due to the inherent limitations of biological neural nets, their cognitive speed is generally slower.

The first species to be annexed into the Covenant after the Writ of Union, the Lekgolo fulfilled a diverse variety of roles within the hegemony. Lekgolo gestalts served as heavy infantry, known as Mgalekgolo (or Hunters to the UNSC), though even more of them were drafted for industrial purposes, operating various machinery. Due to the Covenant's strict ban on artificial intelligence and machine learning, specialized, purpose-bred Lekgolo colonies also fulfilled various computational duties from slipspace navigation to probability computation; strains of Lekgolo also served in roles related to deciphering Forerunner relics, such as the inner pathways of the Forerunner Dreadnought.

Anatomy and physiology
The Lekgolo are the Covenant's most truly alien client species; neither their anatomy nor psychology have obvious counterparts in the native biomes of the other species of the known Orion Arm. This foreignness also makes them inherently reclusive; though they do interact with other species as part of their duties within the Covenant, full-fledged Lekgolo communities tend to be fairly isolated, both by choice and as a byproduct of the physical nature of those communities.