Kirk crew are once again inundated with tribbles in this sequel to the classic Original Series episode “Trouble with Tribbles”. On their way to deliver a new seed grain, quintotriticale, to the starving population on Sherman’s Planet, the last thing the Enterprise needs is more tribbles. However, the prolific fuzzy space pet once again resurfaced to eat copious amounts of the important grain. The last time the Enterprise encountered these things, they multiplied so fast that the ship, and grain supply, were overrun by them. A resulting pile of dead tribbles revealed that the grain supply had been poisoned by Klingons, and the Enterprise crew were able to discover their plot before it was too late.
This time, the grain is perfectly unpoisoned, and Kirk is dismayed to encounter Cyrano Jones and his collection of dangerously prolific pests being chased by a Klingon battlecruiser on his way to the second delivery. The Klingons are using a powerful new weapon which incapacitates entire ships. Kirk wonders why they are targeting Jones. In the end, we find out that Jones not only unleashed tribbles upon Klingons again, effectively threatening the ecosystem of a Klingon planet, but he also stole a small predator animal, called a glommer, that the Klingons engineered to control the tribble population. So many living things, such as the glommer, tribbles, and even the wheat, are being manipulated, used, and fought over because their artificially designed existence implies an ownership of the unsuspecting life form.
Unlike a machine which is built, and then claimed by the builder as his, lifeforms feel pain and stress, reproduce and expand under their own free will, and have natural biological proclivities which can develop beyond what their ‘creator’ has the ability to control. The creation and ownership of life introduces many complications which are not the case for inanimate objects, or even information. Can one legally own a species? Do they own any new species which evolve from the engineered organism? If the organism feels pain or distress, would it have the same rights as a wild animal? Wars are fought over designer lifeforms as they become a novel resource. As soon as we create something new, something of value, it has potential to become the objective in a battle for control. How much pain would this cause the lifeform?
The first designer species mentioned in the story is not the tribble, it is the quintotriticale grain. Today, triticale is a wheat/rye hybrid which combines the yield and quality of wheat with disease resistance of rye. The original four lobed quadrotriticale mentioned in the first tribble episode has been upgraded to a five lobed quintotriticale here, but it was still just as tasty to tribbles. Since the stone age, humans have been selectively breeding plant species for many traits, such as flavor, nutrition, or yeild, but modern technology allows us to take it a step further…some argue a step too far. This episode does not specifically say whether this wheat hybrid was genetically modified or traditionally bred, but the increased lobe number suggests selection for a larger or more calorie dense grain. This is at least a step in the right direction. If the genetic engineering of plants is to be put to positive use, it should at least be limited to producing more nutritious food. Its current applications are mostly focused on creating pesticide/herbicide resistant plant species, or plants which produce their own insecticide. Whether this is detrimental to the environment or not is still hotly contested, but one can say for certain, this is not prioritizing human nutrition.
In another bid for human convenience, the tribbles were genetically modified to not reproduce. To achieve this, a genetic engineer would have to know how tribbles procreate. McCoy makes a few statements about them in the first episode, but this does not conclusively describe their reproductive biology. When he says that the tribbles are ‘born pregnant’, it is not entirely clear whether he means this as an analogy, exaggeration, or literal description. This line had some fans speculate that tribbles were asexual or a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite, but asexual organisms, at least those which reproduce via fission or budding, are not technically ‘pregnant’ at any stage of this reproductive process; they don’t gestate an offspring. The official Star Trek lore does not quite answer this question, but the new batch of genetically engineered tribbles provide more information. The genetically engineered tribbles grow to an enormous size when they eat, and it is eventually revealed that they burst into an avalanche of baby tribbles when popped. It could be that the tribbles originally reproduce by fission (dividing in half), but the genetic engineering prevented them from completing their fission process. There was no indication in the story that this modification was cruel or caused any pain, but interrupting a natural biological process is seldom free from consequences.
The final doctored organism, the glommer, was also genetically engineered by the Klingons, and it ‘belonged’ to them legally. It was designed as a biological control for the tribble infestation, but it also meant a traumatized creature was being shuttled around to service its handlers. We see in the end, when the glommer was presented with a giant tribble to eat, it was shaking in fear. The creature, however primitive, demonstrated psychological distress. For all the engineering and manipulation, the glommer was useless against the giant version of its prey. In the end, even the tribbles were put to use as a bioweapon.
Hopeless Trekkie 