Kan'ess

The Kan'ess are the inhabitants of the Kanes system, and appear in the novel Burning Dreams. They are a 2-meter-tall reptilian race, described as loosely resembling giant snakes that have evolved arms and legs, being able to comport themselves as bipeds or quadrapeds while retaining a serpentine flexibility of the lower body. Carnivores, they feed on living prey, paralyzing it with a curarae-like venom injected through their fangs before swallowing it whole; they possess the snake-like ability to dislocate their jaws, which enables them to swallow a human whole. Cold-blooded, they possess no capacity for perceiving soundwaves and instead use sight, scent and sensitivity to ground-born vibrations to perceive the world; as a result, they have no spoken language and use a language comprised of hand gestures, head nods and rhythmic drumming of feet and tail upon the ground. Their society is purely hunter-gather based, and the development of interplanetary travel had merely resulted in them establishing other planets as hunting grounds.

The Kan'ess and the Federation encountered each other in the year 2262, via the intermediary of Captain Christopher Pike, on the final year of a five-year voyage after the incident on Talos IV. While on a routine investigation of an uninhabited world, Captain Pike discovered the hard way that it was a Kan'essian hunting world when a party of the reptilians descended to the planet and began hunting the Starfleet scouting party. Four of Captain Pike's crew -- Brandt, Norgay, Chisholm and D'zekeo -- were devoured by the hunters, and Captain Pike himself was deliberately taken captive, in an effort to give Spock a chance to escape the planet and warn the rest of the crew aboard the Enterprise. Captain Pike subsequently escaped from the Kan'ess homeworld after spending several days in their captivity, foiling an effort by them to lure the Enterprise to the planet's surface so that they could devour the crew, having developed a taste for human flesh, and strip the Enterprise down in order to advance their own interstellar technology.

The precise result of the Kan'ess first contact with humanity is unknown. Burning Dreams mentions that, after Captain Pike gave his report, the Federation began drafting a directive to cordon off that sector of space until the damage that Captain Pike's unintentional presentation of both the existence of other races and an entirely new method of communicating had been ascertained.