: The Bestiarum (from Halo 3, 2007) states the Hunter homeworld is Te, the
: fifth planet in the Svir star system, relatively close to the Elites' own
: star system. It refers to "Covenant strip miners" and it being a
: high-G world. This all suggests a rocky, Earth-like planet. You don't
: strip mine air.

I agree.

: Now the novel Contact Harvest (also 2007) on page 269 refers to the Hunters'
: homeworld of Te is a "gas giant planet". Now that's strange. Get
: your story straight, Bungie.

In my copy it doesn't mention Te and doesn't say that the gas giant is their home world.

: The novel also alludes to the fact that the Covenant were hoping to score
: relics, but that makes no sense either if it was an all-atmosphere world.

The Luminaries said, "Relics Ahoy!" but when they investigated they were disappointed to find Lekgolo huddled on the planet's rings. I read that as saying they checked out some readings and found little of interest. It was the readings that caught their attention - so they went to have a look see.

: The best way to reconcile it I think is to refer to Te as the Hunters'
: homeworld in the general sense, (and that it can be a gas giant) but that
: the worms developed on one or more of the 25 moons of Te and that the
: strip mining was to take place there rather than the atmosphere of Te
: itself.

If they evolved and weren't made in test tubes in an obliterated Forerunner installation then they would have had to evolve in a long lived environment capable of developing complex life forms. there would be an entire ecosystem with a long history.

CH states that

The icy rocks the made up the rings were in fact fragments of some obliterated Forerunner installation that once orbited the gas giant.

How did they get there?

• Did they evolve on Te and travel to the rings under their own steam? (Lekgolo space program)
• Did the Forerunner take them to their installation as experimental subjects or as immigrants or as long term visitors/guests?
Did the Forerunners make them and seed another planet in the system? (Te)

When did the Forerunner Installation (FI for short) go BOOM? Was it 100,000 years ago? Were the Forerunners reseeding Te, had mostly finished and then their FI asploded leaving some Lekgolo survivors?

If Lekgolo can live on icy rocky fragments then maybe they don't need an atmosphere. We know that they don't breathe oxygen but maybe they don't breathe period.

I speculated that Lekgolo had a nuclear biology. An advantage of that is that they don't need to eat much to sustain their metabolism. They mostly eat to grow - they may be long lived and maybe they could have survived in the rings since the days of the breakup of the FI. maybe they spread via chance collisions. Could individual worms survive freezing? Or would internal radioactive heating keep them warm?

There could have been two populations of Lekgolo - those on the rings and those on Te. Maybe they evolved differences if they had a long separation. Maybe some of the ring populations have differences. They may not, necessarily, have become different species - there could have been smaller differences: size, coloration, tolerance to vacuum, etc.