Duck-ing Questions

[STSF NDak 0]

The biology lab smelled of dead duck. Link rubbed his nose and twitched it slightly. While he could have simply done a full body scan, and holographically imaged the body of the dead duck, given the nature of SWMNBN, he felt it best to do this the old fashioned way, besides holograms weren’t a complete substitute for actually dissecting the real thing.

 

Picking up a small piece of assorted organ, Link glanced at the internal parts. There was only minimal tissue damage from the phaser burn, not enough to actually kill the thing, in his opinion. He wondered if this species of duck had an aversion to nadions.

 

The particular specimen of avian perplexed him further, because it did not appear to be related to any known Avian in the Starfleet database, or at least any that he could match a DNA sample too.

 

The bird itself had many of the same qualities of the Anatidae family from Earth, though a peculiar venom producing organ just below the beak seemed to disqualify them. The venom seemed rather innocuous in small to moderate quantities, and Link felt sure that an anti-venom could easily be developed. The LD-50 value, which he’d tested several times now, was only .892.

 

He began to wonder if they’d been genetically engineered. Avians, as a general rule, lacked poison producing genes, though there were a handful of species, notably the Dameon SkyViper. Not to mention their relative “enigma” factor.

 

Had they been on an away mission, and encountered such a species, he’d be less skeptical, but given that these were apparently something that had found their way onto the Republic, their origin, he was fairly certain, had to have come from a local source that the Republic had visited.

 

With that thought in mind, he continued his autopsy of the dead duck, carefully separating part from part and storing them into containers. When he was finished, he’d begin a cellular analsyis to determine if the ducks had indeed been genetically modified. It would explain a great many things, the poison, the aggressiveness…