10 More Changes That Star Trek Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

The Short Treks episode The Trouble With Edward is hilarious, and a real highlight of the series, but it introduced a very odd change to Trek history.

Tribbles have always been known for breeding extremely fast. In fact, new tribbles were born pregnant and, if they kept eating, they would spread at an exponential rate and totally infest any starship they came aboard. However, in The Trouble With Edward (set before The Trouble With Tribbles), the quirky tribble researcher, Edward, claimed that tribbles would make an excellent food source, if only they were faster at breeding. It was only after Edward infused a tribble with his own DNA that they started to breed at such insane rates.

This is a really funny origin story for the tribbles, but it's complicated by the fact that they were already established to be fast at breeding in the Enterprise episode The Breach.

In The Breach, Dr. Phlox fed a tribble to one of his other pets while explaining to Sato, 'All it's capable of doing, really, is eating and breeding. Problem is, they breed quite prodigiously. The only thing that keeps their population in check is the abundance of reptiles on their homeworld.'