What is "pak'ma'ra"

The pak'ma'ra (the lower-case spelling is canonical) 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.

Humanoid in form, the pak'ma'ra have tentacles around a mouth cavity containing an inflexible beak. Michael Garibaldi describes them as resembling "an octopus that got run over by a truck." They rely on machine translation for interspecies communication. However, Durhan commented once that they refuse to learn any language other than their own. They are capable of singing what several other races considered extremely beautiful music, but only do so on religious holidays.

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 took on the role as couriers for the ISA Rangers because of the distaste other species had for them, and their tendency to be on every major world in numbers but be ignored.

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 as a vaccine was developed before the population was seriously threatened.