29 December: Tribbles

On this date in 1967, Star Trek's The Trouble With Tribbles aired for the first time. Here are ten things you may not know about tribbles.

1. Tribbles are native to the planet Iota Geminorum IV.
2. Tribbles were first encountered by Humans in the early 2150s when Denobulan doctor Phlox brought a small number aboard Enterprise NX-01 as an easily sustainable food source for his pets.
3. They are depicted as small balls of fluff which are soft, gentle and slow moving. When stroked by a human or a Vulcan they will emit a purring or cooing sound which makes them irresistibly cute. They are essentially small bundles of fur with no visible external features. Their fur can be White, Grey, speckled light to dark Brown, Yellow to reddish Orange, and Black.
4. Klingons, however, don't find them cute at all. In fact, the two races are said to be mortal enemies. When Klingons are about, tribbles make a terrible shrieking sound. Some sources say Klingons and tribbles hate each other because they smell revolting to one another. The Klingons even tried to wipe out tribbles completely. Klingon warriors were sent to hunt them down throughout the galaxy, and the tribble homeworld was obliterated in the late 23rd century. "Another glorious chapter in Klingon history. Tell me, do they still sing songs of the Great Tribble Hunt?" the character Odo remarked when told about this. It probably didn't help that tribbles were instrumental in foiling a Klingon plan to poison a shipment of quadrotriticale intended for Sherman's Planet, when tribbles which had eaten the grain were found dead.
5. Dr. Leonard McCoy observed that a tribble has only two purposes in life - to eat and to breed. Tribbles are born pregnant so a single tribble can reproduce exponentially by producing a litter every twelve hours, provided there is sufficient food. On their homeworld, tribble populations were kept in check by a large number of reptilian predators. The expression "multiplying like tribbles" has become commonplace in the context of science fiction or technology. Because they breed so fast and eat so much, Starfleet considers them dangerous organisms and forbids their transportation.
6. Controlling the tribble population in the Star Trek universe has included genetically engineering a predator for them, and also genetically modifying tribbles themselves to stop them breeding so fast - the latter backfired when, instead of reproducing, tribbles just got bigger and bigger as they ate.
7. If that expression is reminiscent of "multiplying like Rabbits" that's no coincidence. David Gerrold, who wrote the original "Trouble with Tribbles" episode said that he was basically telling the story of rabbits in Australia where rabbits had no natural predators and bred like, well, rabbits. Not wanting to use actual rabbits in the story, a ball of Pink fluff attached to a keyring inspired the creatures, as balls of fluff were easy to make in large numbers.
8. The creatures were originally going to be called "fuzzies", but wanting to avoid confusion with a novel called Little Fuzzy, Gerrold brainstormed nonsense words, arriving at "tribble" almost at random. However, the similarity of the word to the word "trouble" made this name the winning contender.
9. Although tribbles only appear in four episodes and only briefly in some of the films, they are one of the most popular and well-known species featured in the Star Trek universe. You don't have to be a hard-core Trekkie to know what a tribble is! The only Star Trek laserdisc to feature episodes from several different series on one disc is called "Triple Tribble Troubles" and features all the episodes in which tribbles appear. In 2006, two tribble props from one episode were auctioned for $800 to $1,200.
10. A family of proteins which have a variety of roles, including control of the cell cycle in the fruit fly, was named after tribbles.