This might be semi-OT, but this is just to keep anybody from griping about the similarities between the Splurge and other species of a similar flavor. There's not a whole lot else going on in this thread, so I don't think I'm interrupting anything.
Biotech-based aliens are hardly anything new and nobody owns the idea. Heck, humans use biotechnology a lot more than you might think. We tamed wolves and turned them into highly-specialized dogs that are in some cases better than just about anything nature ever produced on its own (like the bloodhound's uncanny tracking ability). Then take a look at wheat, of which we cultivate hundreds of millions of tons per year, and which was just another regular kind of
grass before we got a hold of it. Our domestic cattle are selectively bred and so pumped full of hormones that they barely resemble anything occurring in nature, and let's not even get into how they're trying to come up with featherless chickens because those things are borderline nightmare fuel. Add biological weapons to all of that and the fact that
computers based off of genetic material are predicted to overtake their silicon counterparts in the next few years and you can where biotechnology has taken us farther in some cases than mechanical technology has. It just so happens that our horse breeding didn't keep up with automotive manufacturing and we have a lot easier time building new and better machines than breeding new and better organisms to take care of our needs, but it's easy to imagine how that could very easily go the other way, especially on an alien world with very sparse/inaccessible minerals resources but lots of biodiversity and thriving ecosystems.