Species M-113



The M-113 creature (or "salt vampire") was a name that was given to a now-extinct species native to the planet M-113.

The creatures were a highly intelligent species that used telepathy to draw in prey by extracting an image from their minds and taking that form. Once the prey was completely drawn they then used to draw salt from a prey's body through suckers that were on the creatures hands. They also possessed tremendous strength and an ability to survive several phaser shots at short range.

At the height of their existence, there were millions of creatures that roamed around the planet in a similar fashion to the buffalo of Earth. However, by the 2260s only a single speciment lived. In 2264/2265, this lone creature encountered Professor Robert Crater and his wife, Nancy. During this encounter, the creature killed Nancy and took her form to stop Professor Crater from killing it.

Encounter with the USS Enterprise
A year later, the USS Enterprise arrived to conduct medical examinations of the Craters'. By this time, the amount of salt contained in the Craters' encampment drove the creature's hunger to murder Crewman Scott Darnell on the surface of M-113; as Nancy Crater, it blamed Darnell's death on ingestion of a Borgia plant. The creature then went on to murder Crewmen Sturgeon and Green when a further landing party returned to the surface.

Impersonating crewman Green, it returned to the Enterprise, where chance saved Yeoman Janice Rand from becoming its next victim. It followed her when she brought Hikaru Sulu his dinner in the botanical garden, and might have murdered both officers except that Beauregard, a Weeper plant, being studied by Sulu, became agitated and scared it off.

Around this time, Kirk and Spock found Professor Crater on the surface of M-113, and returned to the ship with him. The creature, then impersonating McCoy, sat in on a staff meeting at which it learned that Crater knew how to identify it. Before Crater could reveal how this might be done, the creature murdered him, attempted to feed off Spock, and fled to McCoy's quarters. Kirk found it there, and attempted to lure it to him with salt. In the resulting scuffle, it overpowered Kirk and began to feed on him. It wasn't until the creature dropped its telepathic projection, and Kirk began to scream from the pain of salt extraction, that McCoy was able to shoot and kill the creature. (TOS episode: "The Man Trap").