Pak'ma'ra

The Babylon 5 Universe:

Topic index - Episode list - People list

- -
- - -

The Pak'ma'ra are a fictional race of aliens in the Babylon 5 universe. They do not feature heavily in any storylines, partly on the pretext that other species avoid them because they are, for religious reasons, dedicated carrion eaters (though they may eat spoo out of pure temptation) and partly because the Pak'ma'ra consider themselves superior to other races and so avoid other species themselves.

The Pak'ma'ra are renowned for their intelligence and inquisitiveness, but also for scavenging not only their foods but also technologies.

Broadly humanoid in form, the Pak'ma'ra have tentacles around a mouth cavity containing an inflexible beak, somewhat reminiscent of the mind flayers or Cthulhu. As this combination renders their mouths incapable of forming words in most other species' languages, they rely on machine translation for interspecific communication. However, Durhan commented once that they refuse to learn any other language than their own.

Each Pak'ma'ra has a hump on its back, believed to be its mate.

Until its dissolution, the Pak'ma'ra were members of the League of Non-Aligned Worlds, with an ambassador on Babylon 5. They then became members of the Interstellar Alliance.

The Pak'ma'ra were one of the few other races to be susceptible to the Drafa Plague, though, unlike the Markab, their numbers were not threatened by Second Outbreak in 2259.

The Pak'ma'ra took on the role as couriers once they proved inefficient as Rangers.

Pak'ma'ra diet

The most commonly referenced aspect of the Pak'ma'ra in the series is their unwholesome diet of carrion and sometimes corpses, which all other major species consider repugnant. Pak'ma'ra believe themselves blessed in their ability to eat any land-dwelling animal, and prefer their food to be several days dead. They are fond of eating the corpses of sentient species, and it has been insinuated they will steal bodies in order to do so.

Pak'ma'ra diet is tied to their religious beliefs as well. Pak'ma'ra believe themselves a chosen and superior people, and their ability to consume any other of the sentient species is a sign of this. There have also been references made to a list of approved foods Pak'ma'ra follow. Due to their eating habits, Pak'ma'ra have shown themselves incredibly resistant to food poisoning and disease from rotten meat. However, they are easily nauseated by things outside their preferred diet - to the point of projectile vomiting it.

For some reason, Pak'ma'ra cannot eat fish. Doctor Franklin theorized that the Pak'ma'ra digestive system was fairly selective about the type of matter it could process.

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.