Captain Pike spends this book cosplaying as David Attenborough. Well, no he doesn't, but it's a close thing. I'm not sure that I've read another Trek book that's so focused on an invasive animal (rather than one intelligent species invading another). Here there's an enormous fleet of hungry space whales descending like a swarm of locusts on various planets, and they're able to do so because the local space-faring ecology is out of whack. The solution is to restore the integrity of the food web. Truthfully - and the novel admits this - that food web is extremely basic, consisting of a very few species, and on a biological level this story wouldn't really work, I think, but this is handwavium biology and it's a nice change from all the other types of stories that Trek tells.

I do think that the ending tied up very quickly - it's basically Pike saying "and then we fixed it" - but I like Star Trek and I like ecological stories, so the mix of them together was fun. And the whales were saved, both from being destroyed and from becoming the destruction of everything around them, which was nice.