Butterflies from Rigel X
Clinica Las Mariposas' logo
Alshain preparing to fly with the aid of butterflies
- "The whisper of flitterbird wings over our heads."
- "You painted my face with honey."
- " And a Mordian butterfly landed on your nose. "
A butterfly was a diurnal insect characterized by a slender body, knobbed antennae, and four broad, conspicuously colored wings.
Rain Robinson's van, which was a Volkswagen Type 2, had a butterfly sticker on the passenger side window behind the front seat. (VOY: "Future's End, Part II")
The medical clinic Clinica Las Mariposas was named after the Spanish word for butterfly. (PIC: "Assimilation") The same was true of the SS Mariposa. (TNG: "Up The Long Ladder")
Female dancers seen on Rigel X in 2151 ate butterflies as part of their act. (ENT: "Broken Bow")
The holographic baseball park holo-program where Captain Benjamin Sisko trained the members of his baseball team, the Niners, in 2375, contained a simulation of a white butterfly that flew in the infield behind the pitcher's mound. (DS9: "Take Me Out to the Holosuite")
In 2376, when Icheb was preparing to meet his parents for the first time since he had been assimilated, he told The Doctor that he has a strange feeling in his stomach. The Doctor jokingly replied that he had butterflies in there. Icheb, never having heard that expression, told The Doctor that he in fact had "never assimilated butterflies before". (VOY: "Child's Play")
Butterflies could be hunted with a special net, which became a metaphor for a trap to catch somebody. On Omicron Ceti III in 2267, Dr. Leonard McCoy asked Captain James T. Kirk if he wanted to use a butterfly net on a colonist who was refusing to leave his home for evacuation. (TOS: "This Side of Paradise")
By 2399, Dr. Altan Soong had created synthetic butterflies while on the planet Coppelius, simply because he had missed seeing them. They resembled the butterflies found on Earth, with the additional trait of color-changing wings. While conversing with Jean-Luc Picard in a complex quantum simulation, Data used Soong's butterflies as an example of why he considered death to be an important part of life, saying that "A butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all." (PIC: "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1", "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2")
The Alshain lived in close association with a species of bioluminescent butterfly, which they could summon to form masks and wings that enabled them to fly. (DIS: "Kobayashi Maru")