Noted.

Next booth is dwarf lawn grass, guaranteed not to grow more than four inches tall or to let anything else do so either, not recommended if you have pets or children.

Lame. Skip.

Self-preserving butterflies. You raise the caterpillars, they metamorphose, they get their wings held out and looking pretty and then they dry out like that. (They don't mate first, because they're only selling sterile ones as an IP move.)

Unsettling to begin with, and she particularly doesn't appreciate the IP thing. Katie moves on from this booth.

Slender colorful snakes bred to enjoy being jewelry, tolerating jostling and remaining very much stationary and only pooping right before their scheduled feeding.

Now THIS is genetic-engineering-as-art. Do they enjoy being pet as well?

They certainly don't stop being stationary over it.

How do you get them to move when you want to reconfigure them?

Usually they will repose in jewelry position with their bellies touching the skin and they will flex more if you get a finger under them. It takes a little practice but the model demonstrates with her bracelet and necklace snakes.

Interesting. Katie really hopes they actually do enjoy this.

It's kind of hard to tell with snakes but they have a pretty normal for snakes rate of going off their food and a very low rate of striking.

In any case, she'd probably find them super uncomfortable, so she'll pass.

Butterbugs as seen in the science fiction series The Vorkosigan Saga are real now.

Katie has not read the Vorkosigan Saga. What are Butterbugs?

You know how bees make honey? These decorative beetles (there's a purple and gold kind and a speckly green kind, custom designs price on request) make a weird buttery-puddingy substance that tastes pretty okay, better with sugar or on bread or something. They are the solution to famine and food insecurity worldwide. They are the most revolutionary invention of the century. They could cure cancer, probably. Look, the lady is just really excited about them.

Katie isn't so sure about the rest, but they sure are pretty. 

Next we have hyper-efficient filtration oysters.

Does sucking up all the pollutants make them taste gross?

Yeah, they're not for eating, but you can use them in certain alien technology as chemical batteries.

Damnit. Katie supposes a different biotinker will have to get the prices of the edible ones back down. Hm, maybe she can talk about that to Mo, considering she's already in the seafood business.

The next booth has mice that dance.

Amazing! Like, on two legs and everything? How did they get that to work?

They usually don't spend very long on two legs; the real innovation is that they do it to music and they do it all together. "The real innovation," explains the tinker, "is replacing all mouse social behaviors with an urge to synchronized movement, and I added a symbiotic bacterium to make them sensitive to the beat of whatever they're dancing to. Absolutely any synchronized movement will look impressive and dance-like if it's coordinated across many creatures, and I don't have to choreograph them at all!"

Fascinating! At this point Katie is kind of starting to become curious where the line between good and evil bioscience is. She glances at the mouse person's business card and looks up their name.