Knowing how something reproduces and grow can tell you a lot about how they fight wars. As this is one of the main things that will also help to shape the mindset of a race, not only in wars but in everyday life. And knowing things like birth rates, growth rates, gender population (do they tend to have more females than males or more males than females or is it even), can they change their gender (there are lots of examples of real life animals who can and will change their gender naturally as just a normal part of their life cycle. Example there is a race of fish that when the male who rules the area dies the largest female will change into a male in about a week to replace him.), is there a gender division of labor, and so on. All these things effects how living beings live and act, even Humans.
For example.
A race that has a low birth rate is not going to risk losing the few breeding members they have to fight in a war. So they will seek to avoid any type of fighting that would put them in danger and only let the non-breading members fight. So they would mostly fight using gorilla tactics to sabotage the enemy and fight from long range or fight using remote surrogates (like drones). So the number of enemies we will be fighting is small, but they have many ways of evasion and attacking without having to be there in person.
On the side a race with a high birth rate can throw wave after wave of themselves at an enemy until they win. They just overwhelm the enemy with numbers to win even if you means losing their lives. Because as along as the core breeding population number doesn't drop the race can recover any loses in a short amount of time. So they wouldn't think to much about tactics other than charge the enemy or surround the enemy or pull the enemy into the group and hold them down until someone can make a killing strike.
Although looking for alien artifacts and finding an alien porn stash may sound funny or dumb to some people. But to archaeologists and historians that is really valuable information because it helps them to better learn about and understand the alien's culture, their standards of beauty, and their psychology. You can sometimes learn even more about a group of people by looking at what seems crude as opposed to "high class art". And how could you tell the difference if the culture was really different from you own?
