A swarm of spaceborne creatures encountered by Voyager in 2372 that mistake the ship for a potential mate, and whose energy emissions bring on Kes's elogium years early.
These creatures live and breed in open space. The small ones, each a few metres long, travel in vast swarms and feed on plasma, while far larger individuals move among them. They move by emitting an electrophoretic field.
They appear in the Voyager episode Elogium. Voyager stops to study a swarm and is quickly surrounded, with the small creatures clinging to the hull and draining its systems. Chakotay realises they are behaving as if the ship were a mate. At the same time their field disrupts the crew's biology, most seriously sending the young Ocampa Kes into the elogium, her one fertile period.
A large creature then arrives and treats Voyager as a rival. Rather than fight, the crew imitates a submissive member of the species by rolling over and venting plasma, and the swarm loses interest.