Butterfly
"The whisper of flitterbird wings over our heads."
"You painted my face with honey."
" And a Mordian butterfly landed on your nose. "
- Quark and Natima, describing a love idyll

A butterfly was a diurnal insect characterized by a slender body, knobbed antennae, and four broad, conspicuously colored wings.

The medical clinic Clinica Las Mariposas was named after the Spanish word for butterfly. (PIC: "Assimilation") The same was for the . ()

Female dancers seen on Rigel X in 2151 ate butterflies as part of their act. ()

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 's mound. ()

When in 2376, 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". ()

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. McCoy asked Captain Kirk if he wanted to use a butterfly net on a colonist who was refusing to leave his home for evacuation. ()

By 2399, Dr. Altan Inigo 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." ()

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. ()

Types of butterflies

Mordian butterfly

See also 
Butterfly pasta
Clinica Las Mariposas

External link

de:Schmetterling
Earth insects