XENOLOGY: TRIBBLE

Soft, furry, warm-blooded animal. Tribbles were sold as pets by interstellar trader Cyrano Jones. Tribbles are hermaphroditic and capable of reproducing at prodigious rates, although they will stop breeding when food is withdrawn. Cyrano Jones gave a tribble to Lieutenant Uhura at Deep Space Station K-7 in 2267. When Uhura returned to the Enterprise with her new pet, the tribble quickly multiplied until its offspring nearly overran the ship. Tribbles also multiplied on Station K-7, somehow finding their way into storage compartments containing a valuable grain called quadrotriticale. The grain had been poisoned by a Klingon spy, a fact revealed when many of the tribbles were found dead. The remaining tribbles on K-7 were presumably removed by Cyrano Jones, while Scotty beamed the tribbles from the Enterprise to the Klingon ship, where he expected them to be "no tribble at all." The Klingons considered tribbles to be an ecological menace, a plague to be wiped out. In the latter part of the 23rd century, hundreds of Klingon warriors were sent to track them down throughout the galaxy. An armada obliterated the tribble homeworld, and by the end of the 23rd century, tribbles were believed to have been eradicated. The extinction of the tribbles was reversed in 2373 when some live specimens were transported from the past aboard the Starship Defiant to Deep Space 9.