Are Tribbles Invertebrates?

[Wingsley]

In "The Trouble With Tribbles", we see people picking up and cuddling tribbles. There is special emphasis on them being warm and soft. Cyrano Jones trumpets "Tribbles have no teeth", though they somehow are capable of eating grain. They seem to have structure to their bodies, but they also seem almost featherweight.

Do all of this add up the tribbles being invertebrates? If they have no teeth, they likely have no bones at all. Since there is every reason to believe this species does not originate from Earth (The Enterprise crew act as if they had never seen or heard of these creatures) the definitions of animal lifeforms could differ from ours on some distant world.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Since there is every reason to believe this species does not originate from Earth (The Enterprise crew act as if they had never seen or heard of these creatures) the definitions of animal lifeforms could differ from ours on some distant world.

Plus, from DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations":

WORF: Hundreds of warriors were sent to track them down throughout the galaxy. An armada obliterated the Tribbles' homeworld. By the end of the twenty third century they had been eradicated.

Definitely not Earth.

 

[T'Girl]

though they somehow are capable of eating grain.

Swallow it whole and let their tummy acids do all the work.

 

[Timo]

"Featherweight" is typical of flying vertebrates (birds and bats and fish and lizards), and "fuzzy and warm" goes hand in hand with that lifestyle, too (in the first two cases which involve actual active flight). Also, birds have no teeth...

It would be interesting to see how these things move. After they start breeding, they are everywhere - and not just because the constant budding would push the newcomers away from the previous generation, because there's plenty of separation between them too. Do they crawl? Do they float? Do they get picked up and carried, by people (and animals) who are so dazed they don't even remember performing this service?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

Well, if you remember the bar scene in "The Trouble with Tribbles", when Chekov and Uhura first meet Jones, the tribble clearly crawls over to the grain and starts eating it off the counter. That establishes that tribbles do waddle about.

 

[Timo]

Ah, that clears that up for good...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[scotpens]

FWIW, here's the anatomy of a tribble taken from the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual (1977).

No backbone or skeletal structure, but that's one whopping uterus!

 

[Wingsley]

And we've now established that tribbles do have brains as well...

 

[Timo]

Fittingly directly connected to the esophagus...?!?

Who'd have thunk, the Tribbles actually think before they digest.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

No backbone or skeletal structure

Dated a man like that once.

 

[Wingsley]

^ Dated a tribble? Maybe the great big kind that filled a chair in "More Tribbles, More Troubles?"

 

[T'Girl]

At one point in the episode Scotty says the tribbles are in the machinery, without bones they would be able to squeeze through very small openings.

 

[Green Shirt]

Dated a man like that once.

Was his huge uterus a deal breaker?

 

[Melakon]

FWIW, here's the anatomy of a tribble taken from the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual (1977).

That was by Doug Drexler, and he reused the design when making an illustration for Keiko O'Brian's classroom. So it likely qualifies as canon.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

FWIW, here's the anatomy of a tribble taken from the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual (1977).

No backbone or skeletal structure, but that's one whopping uterus!

This reminds me of something I saw a few years back, I forget where. It was medical records, x-rays and such of cartoon characters like Charlie Brown, Archie, Smurfs, and such.

I'll have to try and find that again, it was funny as hell!