Their hive is set up so only the queen boofer makes any offspring. She makes drones and handmaidens who are submissive queen boofers that she keeps in check with her pheromones.
All the drones are controlled by pheromones along with a weird instinctual hive mind, the drones work, dig, hunt, bring food and protect the hive, handmaidens feed and clean the puppers and take care of the queen’s needs. Then they snuggle up in piles and sleep. They sleep in turns, share food, guard duty and hunting duty is seemingly random. weak or hurt boofs get eaten by the others.
When drones hunt they stealth, usually they hunt in packs while they shapeshift and mimic some of their preys features to throw off their senses and sneak closer. The more of a thing you eat, the better at mimicking you become. Puppers get puked up food for when the hunters return, so they learn their prey while young. but mimicry is something mature boofs rarely use inside the hive. Puppers will play fight, run around and shapeshift into nonsensical prey combinations, pheromones don’t work well on young puppers.
Should the queen die, the hive goes bananas as her pheromones wear off, the handmaidens fight and will kill each other over who will be the next queen, and without the pheromones suppressing them, they start to become mature queens themselves.
The drones usually have a small panic fest on their own, and will fight and squabble, mimic or just groom and loaf about. no work is done, they hunt for themselves, and make their own little hierarchy until the new queen emerges to whip them back in line.
A hive might split if two handmaidens see each other as equally strong and the hive is big enough. It’s a huge mess until one gets to take control over everything again. She will also eat other queens she killed and kill off the puppers she previously cared for, and start fresh.
If two hives are too close to each other, there will be fighting, an older queen might join the fight as she has had time to settle in and make many handmaidens and feels her hive is more secure, but a young queen would probably stay behind her drones or in her nest.
As for getting genetic diversity. Queens do not need to mate, they pick genetic material from what they eat to adapt to the planet they are on, that’s how you get some planets with big boof and some with fast boof, as most creatures have had lots of time to adapt to their planet. Boofers take a general predator shape and do minor adjustments till it fits, the longer a nest is on a planet the more specialized and fit to that planet they become. There are planets they will not survive on, but those that have a fair gravity and edible things on them, they will infest.
Shaun is far away from his queens control and kinda follow whoever commands him around, he is taking his mimic to a bit of an extreme since there are no other boofs around and humans are his pack now.
He is a drone and loves work, whatever work might be. His human disguise is good, but its easy to see that there is something not quite right about him. He thinks its a perfect disguise.
Getting to earth
imagine you are an alien who wants to harvest minerals from a planet
but this planet is inhabited, and protected, because these creatures are sentient, but not quite space age yet
so you grab a very adaptive predator queen and a handful of her offspring and stuff them into a drop-pod
fire it at earth
and hope they dont burn to a crisp going through the stratosphere.
make the pod so that it will disintegrate
because this is Horribly illegal and you dont want it to be traced back at you
but asit was, the most of them didnt survive the tumble, just shaun-
They planned on the boofers just taking over, and make a hive
then i guess there wouldnt be humans around, and the planet would stop being protected
or
someone would notice the boofers murderizing the planet and step in
breaking the 'no contact with non space age races' deal to save the terrans
and then the aliens might swoop in with some terrible trade deals for our minerals and resources.
