STBYM: Biophilia and Pokémon

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the possible effect that the Pokémon franchise has had on the natural sciences during its three decades of pop culture dominance.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert, ma'am.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I am Joe McCormick. And Rob you wanted to
talk about Pokemon today, So you are going to have
to be my Virgil leading me through the pokey hell
and all the way to the Pokey Paradise. Because, as
longtime listeners will know, every time this comes up on
the show, I am lost in a dark wood when

(00:36):
it comes to Pokemon. I do not have the Pokemon
knowledge of my peers.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Well, maybe I am the Virgil of Pokemon because I
cannot enter paradise. I can only take you so far
because I came into it really late as well. We
were actually chatting off Mike with our producer JJ earlier,
and JJ is of the right age to have been
properly brought up in the Pokemon world, and so we

(01:03):
were we were chatting just a little bit about knowing
your way around Pokemon and just the the enormous pop
culture shadow that Pokemon casts for, particularly for millennials in
gen Z, with strong signs that it's going to continue
to play this role for younger generations as well, like
you can people who grew up with Pokemon can did

(01:24):
they just talk about it? They can use it as
reference points. It's it's like a language undo itself.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah. By the way, JJ, if we if we make
a big poke blunder in this episode, please do interrupt
us and we can fill the listeners in with your
with your insights. Yeah, so I'm not like somebody who
has never encountered Pokemon before. My personal experience with it
was basically at the same time as every other kid
in America. I played the original Pokemon game Boy game.

(01:53):
I never finished it, but I played that when it
came out when I was in like sixth grades. I
think this would be like, okay, nineteen ninety eight. So yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
You were exposed to pokemona but I never finished. The
body like built up a resistance to the infection and
then you were immune to it.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
I yeah, so I played part of the original game
Boy game, never finished it. I remember the one I picked.
It was the green one Bulbosar, because he's it seemed
more threatening than the other two, Okay, at least more
than the water the water turtle squirrel.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Thing, because it needed to fight for you. You wanted
a fierce Pokemon.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Right, and it looked more. Yeah, it was like a
little cute but angry little turtle with plants coming off
of it. So I picked that thing. I played part
of the game, and then I basically never interacted with
Pokemon again, except sort of secondhand. I had, like, you know,
friends in college who were playing Pokemon Nintendo sixty four games,
so I got a little bit of that by osmosis,

(02:52):
but otherwise I'm like not plugged in. I get it
all secondhand.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
All right, Well, just a reminder for folks out there,
and I realized most of you do not need to
be reminded what a Pokemon is. I mean, Pokemon are everywhere.
It's again, it's it's enormous. We're, of course talking about
the Japanese Pocket Monster media empire that began as a
nineteen ninety six Nintendo video game for the old game Boy,
the original game Boy, and then shortly thereafter became a

(03:19):
collectible card game as well, and since then it has
grown to encompass television shows, movies, toys, even more video games,
more collectible card games. There's a mobile game now and
it's just generally secured, you know, its place as a
major generational touchstone, as we've been saying, So what's the
basic idea here, Well, it's a fantastic world much like

(03:40):
our own, but populated by a vast array of creatures
called Pokemon or pokemons. I'm not sure the plural is
fan and they often just Pokemon.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Isn't it just pokemon right?

Speaker 2 (03:52):
At any rate? The pokemon or multi pokemons or POKEMONA
I don't know. They often resemble real and folkloreic creatures.
Not every Pokemon is based on an actual animal or plant,
but a huge amount of them are. You also have
ones that are you know, we were talking about one
off Mike with JJ that looks like keys, obviously not

(04:15):
biological in origin. And then there are ghost types that
may or may not match up with animals. But for
the most part you're dealing with a vast ecosystem of
fanciful creatures and or plants.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, and Rob, I don't know if this has changed
it all over the history of Pokemon, because I know
we were now like many generations in but what I
remember from the original game Boy game was you would
collect these monsters from the environment and then you would
make them fight each other, so there is in one
sense kind of a almost a darwin Esque you know,

(04:49):
collecting beetles from the forest sort of thing where you're
looking for specimens. But then there's another element, which is
just you're making them fight.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yes, yeah, yeah, And this my understanding is this is
still very key to the whole thing. I mean, it's
still the one of the main things that you do
in the video games. It is central to the collectible
card game. Not all media, though perhaps there's a Pokemon
media like depends heavily on it. There was like a
really cute kind of oh, what's the word kind of

(05:20):
a comfort show that I believe it was. That it's
actually on Netflix called Let's See Pokemon Concierge, where it's
Pokemon's on vacation and you're just looking after them and
you were trying to prevent them from fighting, or the
main character is trying to prevent them from fighting. It's
very sweet, very relaxing.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
You bring them champagne and an ice bucket.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Maybe not shampa, but whatever champagne would be to a bulbasar,
you might bring it to them. Okay, but yeah, I
guess the other key things to mention are that most
Pokemon go through a series of evolutions, typically but not always,
consisting of three phases, and then humans use poke balls
to capture them and make them.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Fight each other. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
So, as for myself, and I think I may have
mentioned this on the show before I missed out on
Pokemon as a younger person. I think I theoretically could
have caught the bug, but it didn't officially make its
way over to the US until ninety eight. I would
have been twenty at the time, and I guess it
just I wasn't in the place for it, and I
don't think I had any friends that had been infected

(06:27):
with Pokemon, So for the most part, I would hear
about it, but I'm like, oh, I guess that's something
kids are doing, and I'm not a kid right now.
But I of course eventually became a parent, and my
kid certainly got into Pokemon in a major way, and
as a teen, they still seem to really enjoy the franchise.
They're playing the current video game. I think they occasionally

(06:50):
watched some of the media, and they still know their
way around all of the Pokemon lore and classifications. So
if Pokemon business comes up on the podcast, I've covered
them on the Monster Fact episodes before. I will generally
ask them about it and say like, hey, do I
have this ride? Is this Pokemon an example of such
and such? And they'll be able to throw in on
that also alongside them. I have watched the occasional episode

(07:14):
of the Pokemon TV show or one of the TV
shows and found it, you know, engaging and weird. I
watched twenty nineteen's Pokemon Detective Pikachu with them, and I
was actually really impressed with that one. I've considered doing
that one for Weird House at some point. And a
real highlight was we got to visit the Pokemon store
in Tokyo a couple of years back, and that was

(07:37):
overwhelming and super cool. I ended up picking up a
few of the stickers that they have there. I got
one of the Pokemon Ditto and I have Diddos stuck
to my work laptop right now. I have it covering
the Apple logo so that it glows a little bit.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
Oh nice.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Ditto is a shape shifting blob by.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
The way, like the thing, Yeah but.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Cute, you know, the more like the blob If the
blob could could form a human form, Yeah, but you know.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
The thing could be cute, if it copied a cute thing.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
If it wanted to. It never seemed particularly interesting, but
it could.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
I guess that would have been a better strategy.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, so today's episode is going to be less hyper
focused on Pokemon lore, and certainly, you know, we're not
the individuals could really steer that ship. I'm sure there
are any number of podcasts out there that are that
are more capable of that. But instead, we're going to
be talking more about interesting connections to be made between

(08:35):
the Pokemon franchises, core elements, and sometimes specific species, its
popularity with our innate fascination with the natural world. We're
gonna be talking about its connection to biophilia. Now, to
really get into this, I think it's illuminating to go
back to the origins of Pokemon itself. I'm not going

(08:57):
to go through, you know, the full origin story, but
essentially I'm going to touch on a couple of individuals.
There's Junichi Masuda born nineteen sixty eight. He was one
of the key individuals in the creation of the initial
video game, and I believe still serves as chief creative
fellow at the Pokemon Company. I was looking at a

(09:19):
sighted interview that's from him. I was looking at Pokemon
from Bugs to Blockbuster by Simon Parkin from The Guardian
back in twenty thirteen, and in that in the quotations,
Masuda mentions that as a kid in Osaka, he spent
most of his time outside, riding around on his bicycle
and catching insects. Now, I don't know that he was

(09:41):
making the insects fight, but of course we also know
we've discussed before there is the sort of the beatles
sparring that also takes place in Japan, or he used
to take place in Japan. I'm not sure what the
hobby's current status is, but that is probably in the
zeitgeist as well here.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
Yeah, I guess I was wondering about that because I
could have imagined that even if the initial impulse to
create the game was just being inspired by the kind
of naturalists instinct or the collector instinct, you know, like
going out and finding beatles in the woods, that you
might end up wanting to add fighting because it's a

(10:18):
video game and you need like a conflict mechanic and.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
A gangame conflict. I mean, nowadays we can point to
examples of video games that are may be less dependent
on conflict, but certainly at the time, like, can you
imagine a game that didn't have some sort of a
battle or fight central to it. Yeah, yeah, let's see
Another individual, Satoshi Tajiri born nineteen sixty five, also one
of the founding partners, apparently had similar experiences on the

(10:42):
outskirts of Tokyo, cataloging various creatures he found, writing them
all down in a notepad that his parents had given him.
And Parkin also shares in this article that when the
original Red and Blue Pokemon game was released on game Boy,
I didn't really think about this connection, but the plat
form was towards the end of its life cycle, so

(11:03):
there were still plenty of game Boy games coming out
because there were all these game Boys out in the world,
but it made getting coverage for the game a lot
more difficult. The industry was moving on to newer technology,
So it's it's interesting to just imagine, you know, any
kind of property or franchise in its early goings potentially
having a challenge to establish itself because it's such a

(11:25):
juggernaut today.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
That is weird to imagine there was a time when
like new games were still coming out for the game Boy,
and yet there were PlayStations, you know, you were getting
these three dimensional games. Yeah, yeah, and that was happening
at the same time. That is strange.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, So Masuda and Tegery, of course had a great
deal of passion for video games in general as well
as electronics. But it is such an interesting detail that
part of the franchise's genesis was in the collection, cataloging,
and experience of the natural world, and through the Pokemon gains,
they to a large extent, attempted to pass that experience

(12:04):
on to children who in many cases, certainly in Japan,
but then in other markets as well, you know, certainly
as supplies to the US in the following years, you know,
a lot of children just had decreasing ability to experience
the natural world, to experience the organisms of the natural
world and chronicle them in a way that we would

(12:25):
seem almost hired, hardwired to do. And this is where
things tie back into the biophilia hypothesis. We've talked about
this numerous times in the show before. This was a
hypothesis that was concocted by the late EO. Wilson, who
lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty twenty one.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
Wilson was an entomologist who is famous for studying ants,
especially Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
It is essentially, in Wilson's words, the innate tendency to
focus on life and lifelike processes, and as related in
Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon by Boumford, Clegg, Coulson, and Taylor,
this is published in Science Back in two thousand and two.
It can also be thought of as humanity's innate desire
to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life forms.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
So, of course there is an irony in that Pokemon
originally was a video game, so when you're playing it,
you are interacting with an electronic device that is about
as synthetic as objects get. But it would be that
within that realm, within the video game realm of this handheld,
plastic and glass thing you are playing with, you are

(13:37):
getting a simulation of cataloging the diversity of the natural
world instead of just like you know, having Mario run
and jump on things. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
I don't know enough about any precursors to this in
video games, but certainly in the wake of the first
Pokemon game, we can point to any number of games
where you're doing some sort of collecting and logging of
natural organisms. Like just thinking of two games offhand that
I spend a fair amount of time with in the past,
the Fallout games or say Red Dead Redemption. These are

(14:09):
both games where you spend a lot of time wandering
around collecting things. Maybe you're collecting things to make I
don't know, to make something essentially make a potion. But
other times it's just about checking off a list.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
You're finding out what's in the world and then figuring
out what you can do with it.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, and so that is really interesting. I guess one
of the big questions is, ye do this is there
is there something innate in us? Indeed, is the biophilia
hypothesis correct? And we really need to do this? And
we can trace it back to the fact that we
are organisms in the natural world, and we have had
to make our way through that world, understand how each

(14:48):
of these organisms affects us in positive, neutral, or negative fashions,
and then on top of that, with our human ingenuity,
how to augment those parameters and turn a potentially harmful
organism into a helpful one and maybe vice versa. So

(15:08):
the two thousand and two piece in question, it raises
some interesting questions about this supposed relationship between Pokemon fandom
and biophilia. They conduct a study in this, and this
is one of those studies we have to point out
this is a small study. This doesn't concern a tremendous
number of individuals, and certainly we're dealing with like a

(15:30):
a one particular part of the world, and there you know,
all sorts of limitations you would have to take into
into account here. But in it the author has carried
out a study one hundred and nine UK school children
ages four through eleven, and they quiz different age groups
about both real life UK organisms, organisms that you know
would have been more or less in their natural habitat,

(15:53):
and fictional Pokemon organisms. And what they generally observed in
their findings is that the kids started off with a
stronger understanding of natural world organisms around them and less
knowledge of Pokemon. But as they got older, the Pokemon
knowledge kind of took over and took the place of
the natural world wisdom. And there were some other like

(16:15):
you know they were talking about okay, well, you know,
we divided them up into boys and girls, and then
the boys tended to know more about Pokemon and so forth.
So you have to factor all of that into it
as well.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
So the researchers here argue that, on one hand, the
findings demonstrate the young children in general just have a
tremendous capacity for learning about creatures, real or fictional, and
at age eight, the typical child could identify eighty percent
of a sample drawn from one hundred and fifty synthetic
species aka Pokemon, which you know we've all encountered this

(16:48):
with kids. Kids will come up maybe maybe it is
Pokemon specific. A kid will come up to you and
start talking at you about Pokemon, and it can be overwhelming,
and you're like, no, thank you, I really don't need
to hear all of this, But you have to admit, like,
it's amazing that they have all of these facts in
their head. Granted there's all sorts of stuff they don't
have to remember yet, but they have tremendous capacity for

(17:10):
memorizing all this stuff. I certainly see that with my
own kiddo. I mean, granted, you know there's the Pokemon example,
but you know we also share a love for dungeons
and dragons, so you know, both of us can rattle
off some stats about the various monsters and with my kid.

(17:30):
They also got super into herpetology years back, and so
they you know, this does have at least in their
their case, and I think in many kids cases, there's
also the real world component, like learning about the animals
in your natural environment and then potentially other environments, like
we don't live by the ocean, but we know a
number of foceanic creatures and it As a kid, I

(17:52):
remember being really into that, like, oh, sharks are neat.
I want to see a chart of all the different
types of sharks so that I can memorize them for
some reason. Yeah, and it can even spill over, I think,
into things that are not animals, but maybe a little
that you can certainly anthropomorphize to some degree, you know,
like airplanes. Like when I was growing up, my dad

(18:13):
was a big World War Two buff and was often
working on, say, a model of the World War two aircraft,
and so for a while there I could really rattle
off a number of different makes and models of World
War two planes, you know, which are kind of like
sharks of the sky.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
Well, Rob, if I can observe something about your personality,
I mean, you seem to me to be a person
who has a very an encyclopedist's kind of framing. I
think you like to have You like to have lists
and catalogs of things to like learn all of the
items in the list and know all of the you know,

(18:49):
the names of the things on that list, which I
don't know. Knowing that about you, I can see how
that that also transcends just the biological realm. I mean,
like that's a general impulse about like organizing knowledge, but
then when you bring it to the natural world, it
has this particular kind of taxonomy or creature understanding principle

(19:10):
behind it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
Yeah, And whether we're thinking about it or not, we
are learning like the map of the ecosystem and ecosystems
that we are a part of. Yah. Now, coming back

(19:32):
to that two thousand and two paper, the authors here
argue that based on the children that they quipped in
their study, they made an argument that quote conservationists are
doing less well than the creators of Pokemon inspiring interest
in their subjects. Now, granted, we've had quite a while
since two thousand and two, and I think there have

(19:52):
been efforts to sort of capitalize in the Pokemon fandom
to figure out new ways to get people excited about
the natural World. Yeah, and I've done just a little
bit of that on the show before, doing like Monster
Fact episodes, like here's this Pokemon, but it's you know,
it's clearly based on this organism, and there's there's a
lot of fun to be had with that kind of
connection making.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Well, I mean, in the case of Pokemon, you can
have the interest in the subject matter organized by the
medium itself. So it's like the fact that it's a
game that's fun to play, or a TV show that
all your friends are watching, like drives interest in the
subject matter that's being featured there. So I wonder if
there was a similarly engaging game or TV show that

(20:34):
just had the actual world creatures instead of the Pokemon,
if you would not see a similar increase in knowledge.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
Right right, Like, for instance, nobody out there is just
for the most part, I think learning a list of
all the X Men characters, we learn them also because
they have stories and they have connections to each other,
and all of this makes you know, becomes a cat's
cradle of fascination. Yeah, and the same, of course can
be said natural World. So the authors here stress something

(21:04):
we already mentioned before that a lot of this might
have to do with an increased distance between individuals in
the natural world. As we live our lives more removed
from nature, our knowledge of it falls away, And then
presumably that's when something like Pokemon comes into play, giving
us a whole host of imaginary creatures to throw our
cataloging mental faculties at you. After all, we've arrived in

(21:27):
a cultural place, particularly in large urban settings, where knowledge
of natural world organisms doesn't highly illuminate the world that
we're interacting with. We're not id in creatures. We see creatures,
we avoid creatures, we eat, creatures, we utilize in other ways.
So there's an argument to be made that instead we
end up cataloging the fictional creatures that we engage with

(21:49):
in our entertainment, which live within a pervasive or array
of captivating video games, card games, media, and shared imaginary worlds.
This is I think worth stressing as well. We talked
about Pokemon ever so briefly in our episodes about imaginary
friends and imaginary worlds, and I would I would observe

(22:12):
this between my kid and one of their friends, where
when they were hanging out, they would just make up
a whole bunch of stories about Pokemon and like tell
them to each other like they had a whole and
it was largely divorced from the actual Pokemon fandom world.
This was about like armies of Pokemon marching against each
other as something.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Wow, what were the big rivalries?

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Oh, it had to do with with Pikachu. They they
decided that they didn't like Pikachu, and Pikachu was like
the ultimate enemy. It's kind of like, you know, Pikachu
was the the superstar of of Pokemon, and I guess
still is. You know, he's the poster child and I
Pikachu backlash.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
Yeah, And I think they were like, you know, Pikachu
is not the best. Clearly, these other ones are the best. Ironically,
one of the ones they thought was actually the best
was Piachu, which is a lower, less evolved version of Pikachu.
But yeah, they were big about championing these other creatures
over Pikachu.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Yeah, this is the one I've heard described as there's
a Pikachu baby.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Now, Yes, Yeah, essentially a Pikachu baby that is cuter,
has everything Pikachu brings to the table, except even cuter.
It's like Pikachu crack. Really, it's just super refined it's.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
The baby Yoda of Pikachu.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (23:29):
We live in an era where you've got to have
a baby version of everything.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Mm hmm. But I in general, though, I think this
is an interesting way to sort of self analyze some
of the at times useless seeming trivia that we can accumulate.
I don't know about you, Joe, but I will occasionally
find myself in this situation where hopefully I'm not called
out on it, though that has occurred as well, where

(23:52):
I'll at least realize, oh, I have a fairly expansive
catalog of say B movie actors in my head. But
then I may still struggle to remember some vital piece
of information about my actual life. Yeah, oh yeah, and
you're like, why does that happen? Like why? You know?
People may encounter that with Pokemon and specifically, like maybe

(24:12):
you forget your anniversary, but you remember all the Pokemon
ghost type evolutions, Like what's going on there?

Speaker 3 (24:17):
I think this is an extremely common experience that people find,
for whatever reason, they have an easy time remembering information
that is not as important and a harder time remembering
things that are more meaningful and more important. Ye. I
don't think I don't have an overarching theory of why
that is. But maybe it's just I don't know. Some

(24:39):
types of information are easier to dwell on. I mean,
I do think that information is easier to retrieve when
you retrieve it often, So you know, if you find yourself,
I don't know, if something is less stressful to think
about or I don't know, easier to think about, maybe
more entertaining, you will will keep going back there, whether

(25:01):
for you know, with external stimulation, like you're watching a
movie again or reading about something again, or you're just
thinking about it again. But I've had the same experience,
not so much with I don't know if I know
catalogs of Pokemon really, but I, you know, find myself like, wow,
I have a really good memory for quoting dialogue from

(25:23):
movies verbatim, And I don't know why that is. And
I wish that memory were better deployed to things that
matter more in like my social and human life, or
in you know, remembering things that are actually useful.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, I mean, obviously we have to remind everyone. Memory
is complex and there's so many different factors going on, like,
for instance, sometimes you are less likely to remember a
vital piece of information. If you know that, say your
significant other is remembering that for you, or you suspect
that they are, your brain like makes choices like this, like, well,
we don't need to hold onto that as tightly because

(25:57):
that is held by someone else. Yeah, and you know,
and perhaps in any given relationship, someone's brain is like,
you need to be the keeper of the pokemon lord.
This is more important than remembering when the water bells do.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
That's your job. Yeah, remember remember snorlax.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
But if we were to connect this to some sort
of like you know, important knowledge about the natural world,
then it would be important.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
You know.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
It's like, okay, well maybe this other person maybe they
know how to cook, or they know how to hunt,
whatever the case may be. But clearly it's important for
me to know what all the creatures are out there,
what all the plants are, and what their roles are
in our use of the natural world.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
So so yeah, we might think about pokemon fandom is
something that kind of co ops a natural inclination that
might be better harnessed for naturalists and conservationist causes. But
another way of loosely interpreting all of this is that
perhaps pokemon fandom lives comfortably alongside interest in the natural world,
and maybe can even inspire it, because on one hand, like, yeah,

(27:04):
there are more than I think more than a thousand
Pokemon species easy at this point, and a lot of them,
if not most of them, and I think it is
most of them by a pretty significant degree are based
on real creatures living or extinct, or they're based on
folkloric or mythological entities that themselves are based to some

(27:26):
degree on a combination of actual real world organisms. Given
the franchises Japanese roots, you do seem more likely to
see local creatures, creatures that people of Japan would come
into contact with and have knowledge of, And the same
can also be said for mythological and folkloric references. So

(27:47):
there are various Pokemon that are clearly based on Yokai,
but then you can expand that regionally. They are also
Pokemon that are based on Chinese mythological figures as well,
And you know, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that. Okay,
if you have this game that is making kids think
about these various bioforms, it could inspire interest in the

(28:08):
things they're based upon, be they folklore, mythology or biology.
I asked my kid about this, because again, they're super
into reptile and amphibian classifications and they can rattle a
lot of that off, you know, certainly as well as
they could rattle off Pokemon classifications, and I don't know.
They seem to consider these to be two separate things,

(28:28):
but acknowledged that there were some similarities in like the databases.
I guess now in terms of to what extent like
the diversity of the Pokemon world matches up with real
ecosystem diversity, I found a couple of interesting papers, both
from the Journal of Geek Studies, both Brazilian in origin,

(28:52):
and both published in twenty seventeen, but by different authors.
There's one titled the Theological Diversity of Pokemon, and this
one was by Mendes at All, and the other one
is Arthropod Diversity in Pokemon by Preto and Almida. So
in general, I'm not going to go through all the
points in these papers, but in general, the findings seem

(29:13):
to indicate that, first of all, arthropod representation in Pokemon
is high and in general is in keeping with the
vast array of arthropod diversity that we find in the
natural world, where they account for something like eighty percent
of all known living animal species and a sizable portion
of the biomass.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
Yeah, I would think a huge portion of that would
just be accounted for by insects alone.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
However, they note that the high number of crustacean based
pokemons compared to calliserate based pokemons does seem to be
at odds with the natural world, and probably has more
to do with the quote very frequent contact that Japanese
people have with aquatic animals. Okay, So in general, and
I'm not sure if this my version of this actually

(29:58):
matches up with the Pokemon database info, but it would
seem to mean you're going to encounter more crab based
Pokemon than there are shrimp based Pokemon and so forth.
Then you would encounter spider based Pokemon I see.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
Okay, and hard to complain about that, like, oh, they're
giving us too many crabs, I can't see. Yes.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
Meanwhile, in the other paper concerning the fish fish being
the largest vertebrate animal group, they are also well represented.
They say, quote fish pokemon are very diverse creatures both
taxonomic and ecologically. Despite being a small group within the
Pokemon universe with eight hundred and one species. They speculate
that the diversity of habitat types and real life fish

(30:41):
analogs is only going to increase as more Pokemon are
rolled out, and they would have been since this paper
came out. But they argue that it already constituted a
kind of quote biological pocket world that matches up with
the actual biological world in key way, so kind of
a fictional reflection of now diversity. And so I mean,

(31:02):
you can you can base that in. You can look
at that in a number of ways. You know. It's
like if you're creating a fantasy world, it's generally to
some degree mirroring a real world. Like you can look
at Middle Earth or West Euros and yeah, those are
there's there are a lot of clear analogs going on there,
And the same would be expected of some sort of

(31:23):
an imagined ecology, especially one that's not on an alien
world but a fictional version of our own world. But
if the biophilia connection is certainly in play here, it
makes even more sense that your imagined ecosystem would would
so closely match up, at least in broad strokes, with

(31:43):
what is actually out there. So anyway, for my part, anyway,
I find all this this interesting, this way that this
big franchise, this thing that many people may just think
of is pure fun, pure entertainment, and that's perfectly fine.
But what if it does say something really essential about
who we are and how we react and and and

(32:03):
experience the natural world?

Speaker 3 (32:05):
That is interesting? I don't know if I'd ever thought
of it that way? Can I? Can I shift to
the more specific and ask you a question about fish pokemon?

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Sure? Sure?

Speaker 3 (32:15):
How do they fight? Do they fight on land? How
does that work? I see, like, you know, so you
throw out your poke balls and they fight, and it's
like in an arena or on grass. What if it's
a fish flop?

Speaker 2 (32:26):
I think sometimes they do flop for comedic purposes. But
I think also these battles tend to be kind of
like big anime battles. Right, So it's again, they're not
necessarily necessarily fighting each other with like mouth and talon.
It's more like energy balls and stuff and lightning bolts
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
Does the fight take place within a kind of second
psychic realm?

Speaker 2 (32:51):
Kind of?

Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (32:52):
I mean it's it's it's kind of it's you know,
it's sort of like that moment in Big Trouble and
Little China where low Pa and Annection are battling and
they kind of do this video game thing where each
one is controlling some sort of a force different, you know,
light warriors battling each other. It's essentially what's going on here. So,

(33:15):
you know, no matter how I guess, it is a
good reminder, yeat, no matter how interesting the natural connections
might be in some of the the cataloging and the diversity,
when it comes down to the fighting, yeah, it's I
don't think there's there's much that really closely mirrors what
actual organisms are doing.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
No, I get you. So even a fish out of
water can emit rays.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yes, yes, but like you said earlier though, you know,
sometimes sleeping is the attack, Sometimes flopping is probably the attack.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
All right. Do you want to get into these species
named after Pokemon? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, because I think this is another interesting area to
get into because it does kind of support this idea
that hey, you can you know, you can certainly be
into Pokemon and then you can actually you can actually
become a scientist. You know. We again, it's been a
huge generational touchstone, and so we have various examples of
people with varying degrees of Pokemon knowledge who then go

(34:22):
out into the world as scientists discover new organisms, name
new organisms, and name them after Pokemon.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Mm hmm h. Yeah. So Rob, when you asked me
to look into this, you referred me to a list
maintained on the bulb Apedia, which is great. This is
sort of like the Wookipedia of the Pokemon universe. I
like that, and I wish I could have helped them
name it, because I feel like you've got a lot
of potential there to call it like the Codex Pokemonicus
or something.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Yeah, yeah, I think it's This is like the sort
of like fan generated version. Could be wrong on this,
and then the poke des is like the official listing
and is also like the in game cattle of Pokemon.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
That's the one maintained by the Empire. But yes, but yeah,
so you've got people adding these things. So anyway, I
did look some of these up, and I've got some
thoughts in general about how these naming conventions work out.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, and this is going to be really fun. But first,
first of all, I do want to make a quick
note here about Pokemon creature names. This is not going
to be new information for a lot of you out there.
But some Pokemon retain or largely retain their original Japanese names,
so like Pikachu, mewtwo, Pichu, while others are changed at
least a little and sometimes quite a bit for the

(35:36):
English language market. So for instance, Lizardon became Charizard, Kabigan
became snorlax Puran became jigly Puff, and one of my
favorites yad On. I think that's that I may be
mispronouncing the Japanese name, but he becomes slow Poke. Slow
Poke has an amazing life cycle, and my kids showed

(35:59):
me a slow Poke episode of the cartoon once that
I thought was just super weird. It was like a
stoner animation, so I was really impressed by that. But anyway,
one of the main reasons for all of this is
that sometimes the wordplay in Japanese just doesn't translate, or
they feel like, well, let's try a name that accomplishes
the same thing but in English.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
Yeah. Now, before we get into some of these species
that have been named after Pokemon, I do have to
take a little digression here to talk about the law.
Many scientists have tried to name things after Pokemon, and
the company that owns the Pokemon trademark has not always
taken kindly to this. It is with a heavy heart

(36:43):
that I must report that sometimes the lawyers are brought
in about Pokemon naming. One example that I came across
is described in a two thousand and five news article
in Nature by Tom Simonite called Pokemon block's gene name.
The lead of this article reads, quote, A cancer research

(37:03):
institute has been threatened with legal action by the US
branch of Japanese video game franchise Pokemon after one of
its researchers borrowed the company's trademark to name an oncogene.
An onco gene is a gene that has the potential
to cause cancer. I've also seen the gene in this
story referred to as a proto onco gene. So the

(37:24):
origin of this conflict is that a group of cancer
researchers led by Pierre Paolo Pandulfi of Memorial Sloan Kettering
Cancer Center in New York. I think they first talked
about this in a conference presentation in two thousand and one.
They were introducing the discovery or naming of a cancer
gene that they called the Pokemon gene, so named because

(37:48):
it came from a family already known as the Pok
genes pok letters pok and then this particular gene was
the pok erythroid myeloid ontogenic, which acronymed out pretty nicely
to Pokemon. And so when this group published their findings

(38:10):
and nomenclature in the journal Nature in two thousand and five,
some subsequent reporting I think seized on this delicious opportunity
to run headlines like scientists discover Pokemon causes cancer.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Oh well, that was bound to happen, wasn't it.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
Pokemon USA did not like this. They got involved and
threatened to sue the scientists unless they changed the name
of the gene. The scientists involved protested that the name
of the gene didn't have anything to do with the
game or the cartoon. It was just an acronym. It
was like the pok emont a. You know, I guess

(38:48):
it's questionable. You can think they knew what they were doing,
or maybe you can think they didn't. I don't really know.
But their claim was it's just an acronym from what
this gene is. But in response to that, I'm going
to read from this two thousand and five article quote
a spokeswoman for Pokemon USA told Nature that its image
was at risk. Quote. We don't want our image undermined

(39:10):
by associating Pokemon with cancer, she said. So. This article
notes that it is not the only time a researcher
has been threatened with legal action over the name of
a gene. For example, in nineteen ninety three, the Velcro
Corporation threatened to sue a scientist named Alfonso Martinez Arius

(39:30):
of the University of Cambridge because he named a fruit
fly gene the velcrow gene. I want to note that
in looking this up, it seems to me like the
Velcrow Corporation is especially sensitive about use of the word velcrow.
Like they've got this whole ad campaign about trying to
get people to not use that word as a verb

(39:51):
or as a generic now and they're like, no, it's
called hook and loop. Velcrow is the name of the company.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah. I mean, there's a an amount of drift like
that that is unavoidable. You know, it's gonna you're going
to call you know, whatever the most prominent brand name is.
You're just going to call it that. You know, it's
like people asking for a coke when they're not really
talking about a Coca Cola. It's just that, you know,
this is what comes with having a successful franchise.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
I don't know, but I wonder if this is one
of those cases of extremely aggressive intellectual property claims that
are based on like lawyers telling a company that they
cannot allow a certain kind of precedent to be set,
like you always have to pursue this aggressively, or in
the future you may not be able to make claims
that you want to. Yeah, but anyway, there it hasn't

(40:41):
always happened with genes named after named after protected properties.
There is a gene known as the sonic hedgehogs gene
that has escaped this fate. So hats off to Sega
for being cool about that. But the the legal threats
worked in the case of the Pokemon gene, which is
now known by the some would say equally catchy name

(41:02):
z bTB seven.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
I mean, I don't want to get into the legal
ins and outs here is, but I mean I can
I can kind of see where the Pokemon lawyers are
coming from here, right, I mean, if you're talking about
something that is linked to cancer.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Well, yeah, I certainly understand their perspective, though I think
I just generally have an orientation that it's a bummer
to be suing scientists about Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Yeah, absolutely yeah. And I mean, would it really have
reflected poorly on on the Pokemon brand?

Speaker 3 (41:36):
I doubt it. But anyway, there was another thing, So
this one. I want to be careful in how I
couch this because I did not find this verified by
any reporting, So nobody, as far as I know, nobody
tracked this down to the source to make one hundred
percent sure this is true. But I found a seven
year old Reddit post that claimed to be an entomologist

(41:58):
trying to hold a contest to name some new ant
species after Pokemon. And this post claims that they started
to do this contest thing, and then they contacted the
Pokemon company to get their blessing to go through with this,
you know, naming these species after Pokemon, and instead got
some legal threats. That is what the post claims they

(42:20):
were told not to use any names. Again, don't have
total confidence in the story because it's just a Reddit
post like this could be anybody, But if true, that
would be somewhat consistent with this other story. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Yeah, And certainly when you're dealing with big companies like
this is probably what somebody's job to go around and
like make sure that the certain names and certain ideas
are not being used by other people, even if it's
a case where if you went down like to the
creative levels, they would be like, oh, that's why are
you causing a stir over this?

Speaker 3 (42:52):
You know, right exactly. But it's weird because for some reason,
this has not been the universal fame of biological entities
named after pokemon. Quite a number of them exist, and
I truly don't know if it's because these other things
like slipped under the company's radar and then it was

(43:13):
too late for them to do anything about it, or
if it's because the company is cool with some associations
and not others. I don't know why they'd be okay
with a bee but not an aunt. Yeah, but anyway,
are you ready to talk about a few of these.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Yeah, let's talk about some specific pokemon.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
The first example is a species of wasp named after
the pokemon known as Wheedle. And I was looking at
these images, I was like, I remember this guy, so okay,
so I at least made it far enough in the
original game Boy game to meet a Wheedle. Here's a
little curious little caterpillar with like a purple clown nose,

(43:52):
very adorable eyes, little baby dough eyes, looking up at you.
It's got a posture that's kind of like, you know,
a kitten raising up on its back legs at you, like,
oh please, you know, can I please have a treat?
But then it all it's very cute in that respect.
But then this cute little caterpillar has what looks like
a knife blade for a tail and a metal spike

(44:15):
on its head, a kind of conical spike like a
party hat. So Wheedle is viciously cute, but does have weapons.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah, I had to look this one up. This is
not what I was familiar with. Apparently, Wheedle evolves into Cocuna,
which is a kind of crystalis or a cocoon. Now
I realize that's that's what the name means. And then
this evolves into b Drill. This is a bee or
wasp like creature that seems to have spikes or drills

(44:43):
for hands, and also a stinger so it can like
poke you numerous ways.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
I guess, right, So the conical spike that's on this
caterpillar's head in the evolved form, those are its hands,
So it's like Edward's spike hands. Yeah. Yeah. So the
species named after this pokemon is a type of parasitoid
wasp from Eastern Africa, described in a paper by Nielsen
and Buffington in the Journal African Entomology in twenty eleven.

(45:09):
This paper describes five new species of the genus stint Torsps.
This one is called stin Torsps wheed alee or I
don't know. If I didn't know it is named after
the pokemon, I might have thought that was like weed late. Yeah,
we'd lay I or we'd lay em. Anyway, why is
it named after wheedl Because like Wheedle, this wasp has

(45:32):
a spine jutting out of the middle of its head. Rob,
I've got some images for you to look at in
the outline here you might be able to say. It's
kind of hard to see, but there's a little I
think you can see a little spine sticking out of
its head between the antennae here, Yeah, I see it.
This species was found in Madagascar. I couldn't get a
lot more information about its behavior or morphology. But this

(45:54):
is what it looks like. It's got a horn and
as far as I can tell, no knife tail.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
Yeah, no drills for arms on this guy.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
Okay, how about some Pikachu's you ready, There are quite
a few of these.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
I guess that would make sense given Pikachu's popularity.

Speaker 3 (46:08):
I found at least four. I'm gonna do these kind
of rapid fire. One is called Dicranocentris Pikachu. This is
a species of springtail found in Brazil. Springtails are a
large class of six legged arthropods, not insects, but they
are hexapods. This species was named and described by Zisto

(46:29):
and Mendonsa, and I couldn't find a lot of info
on it, no picture that I could verify, but it
is a type of springtail named after Pikachu. The next species,
this one has a little bit more to look at.
This is called Hyperantha Pikachu. It is a species of
jewel beetle from Brazil, described in an article in Zootaxa

(46:50):
by Pineda and Barros in twenty twenty one. And here
the authors have an etymology note in their paper They say,
quote the pacific name is an homage to Pikachu, a
fictional monster which this species resembles in its yellow elytra
with a black apical band like the ears of Pikachu.

(47:11):
And so rob I've attached some pictures for you to
look at in the outline here. It is a beetle,
and the elytra refers to the hard coverings of the
hard coverings on the outside of the wings, so you
might it's kind of a shell that closes over the wings,
and you can see there it is very yellow. So
it's a yellow and black beetle. And I don't know,

(47:32):
do you see Pikachu. I see the Pikachu colors.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
I think this is Pikachu. I see Pikachu. One out
of percent. Okay, yeah, yeah, this is Pikachu as a
flying insect.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Next one is Alistra pikachu. This is described by linn
at All in a twenty twenty one paper in Zoological Systematics.
This paper reports on twenty three new spider species discovered
from various places in China and India. Elistra Pikachu is
a little tiny spider measuring less than two millimeters at most,

(48:03):
discovered in a cave in Guangdong Province in Southeast China.
The authors say that it was named after Pikachu because
it is yellow. And also in the same paper, the
authors describe a pale cave spider that they name sinopesa
Gollum and they acknowledge, yes, this is a pale cave

(48:24):
spider named after Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Hmmm, okay, I couldn't find a picture of the Gollum
spider the Pikachu spider, and I don't feel as strongly
about this one. It's like, okay, I guess it's it
is kind of yellow. I guess you could call it
a Pikachu spider, but not as strong a case to
be made here in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
So the next one is Epicritinus Pikachu, named in a
twenty twenty paper by Goncalvas and Breaskovit. This describes eleven
new species of spider from the genus Epicritinus, all found
in Brazil. The authors here were going wild with video
game names and other nerd references in naming these spiders.

(49:08):
So it's naming eleven spider species. One of them is
Epicritinus Zengi for Zengi street Fighter. There's also an Epicritinus
e Honda. There's there's an Epcritinus Anakin, and an Epicatrinus Vader.
Oh wow, there's an Epicritinas Pikachu. Of course, there's an

(49:31):
Epicritinus Pegasus, and Epicatinus Zelda, and then some other things
I don't know. I don't recognize, but maybe they're from something.
Epicritinus Omegaarugal, Epicritinus dou Can. I don't know what those are.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
Yeah, the listeners write in, if you know what a
duke can is.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Oh, and there's one Epocritinus Stitch. Is that Leelo and Stitch,
it would have to be.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
That's Maybe it's something more obscure from anime as well,
But that's that's the connection I'm making.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
Okay, here's where this one gets good. About the Pikachu one.
In this case, the name Pikachu was not chosen just
because the spider is yellow or yellow and black. They
claim the inspiration is about a specific part of an
at of the anatomy quote etymology. The specific epithet is
a noun taken in apposition and is in reference to Pikachu,

(50:23):
a fictional rodent and electrical creature that's a great description.
I Love Love a fictional rodent and electrical creature that
appears in an assortment of video games, anime, et cetera,
licensed by the Pokemon Company. And then now they're speaking
of the spider. The female epigonum resembles the face of Pikachu.

(50:43):
Now what does that mean? Well, the epiginum of a
spider is the external genital organ of a female spider.
It is a hardened plate on the underside of the
female spider's abdomen, which has these openings that receive sperm
from the male's petipalps during mating. The epigonum often has

(51:06):
distinctive markings that can help with species identification, and in
this case, the authors think that this spider's genitals look
like Pikachu's face. Rob, I'll let you be the judge.
I've attached a view in right below this in the
outline here, I've got a ventral view of the female
spider on the right, so you can see down on
the abdomen. The genital plate is going to be near

(51:28):
the top of the underside of the abdomen. Do you
see Pikachu in this spider crotch?

Speaker 2 (51:33):
Who I want to see Pikachu in this spider crotch.
I feel like I'm looking at a like a magic
eye puzzle here, and I want to be a part
of the magic but I'm having trouble seeing it. I'm
flipping back and forth between this and some pictures of Pikachu.
I want to believe, but I'm having trouble.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Shoe, Well, I thought maybe you would see Okay, maybe,
I just want to make sure you're looking at the
right place. So you're looking on the underside view of
the spider, near the top of the abdomen, you don't
see a little thing that looks kind of like it
has It's like a yellow face with black bunny ears
and black spots that could be eyes.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Okay, Okay, now that I'm looking more specifically, yeah, yeah, okay,
I can see it. I can see it. It's yeah,
that that could be a Pikachu, all right, Okay.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
I think probably, though I'm not an expert on this, obviously,
but I believe the things that we're interpreting as Pikachu's
eyes here would be the holes that receive the sperm
during mating.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, and the things that we're seeing are that are
the ears of the Pikachu. These are part of the
coloration that we see on the rest of the abdomen
the plate.

Speaker 3 (52:40):
Yeah, I think the ears are just part of the
epigonum plate.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Okay, all right, okay, I've I've come around to this one. Yeah,
I do believe now, Okay.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Pikachu face genitals confirmed. All right. Next one is the
charizard bee. In twenty sixteen, a researcher named Spencer K.

(53:10):
Monkton published a paper in the journal Zoo Keys describing
eight new species of bee in the subgenus chili Cola
living in Chile. One of these species was given the
name Chilicola charizard.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Charizard's the little dragon with the tail on fire.

Speaker 3 (53:27):
Yes, pretty iconic. So the paper itself doesn't say why
he chose to name this bee after a pokemon, but
I found a bit more detail in a press release
from twenty sixteen, so I looked this up on Eurek Alert.
The species is part of a family known sometimes as
the polyester bees or as cellophane bees. These bees secrete

(53:49):
a substance that they used to line the walls of
their nest cells. I think they're primarily ground burrowing bees,
or sometimes they might be stem burrowing, but they create
these nest cells and they line them with this secretion that,
once it hardens, forms a smooth lining that people compare
to clear plastic film or cellophane. So what's the similarity

(54:12):
with Charizard. Like Charizard, the stem nesting Charizard bee is
usually found around mountains, in this case the andes. So
I had to get the detail that Charizar the pokemon
is found around mountains from his article. I didn't know
that because again I thought you get Charizard at the
beginning of the game. But maybe it's in the wild too.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
I don't know. Yeah, I know in the Detective Pikachu
movie it's like an urban in an urban environment, but
I guess that's not its natural habitat.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
Okay, but it has some so the author claims it
has some visual features in common. Rob I've got pictures
of this bee for you to look at in the
outline down below. You can compare this as I as
I read through the features quote, long snout like face,
broad hind limbs. So Charizard, I guess has like big legs,

(55:03):
thick thighs and yeah, big legs, so long snout like
face and broad hind limbs with antennae in place of horns.
So charizard has horns, the charizard bee has antenna. Of course,
what do you think?

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Hmm? I mean, I'll take it. I'll take it, but
but it does seem like maybe a little bit more
of a stretch.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
This bee is very small, between four and seven millimeters
in length. In life. It is not red or orange
like charizard. It's mostly dark brown, black and yellow. But
apparently when you preserve specimens of this bee in the lab,
its yellow markings tend to turn orange, which Monkton said
quote cemented the comparison. Okay, I feel like maybe he

(55:47):
was trying to get there, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
I guess One of the things to keep in mind
in all of these examples is like, otherwise, what are
you naming these species after? You have to name them
after something, and you know a lot of species end
up being big be named after individuals or after say
mythological figures and something like.

Speaker 3 (56:05):
Those tem physical traits or if you.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
Have physical traits. But you know, there are also plenty
of examples that are named after mythological figures, and you
know these this is the new mythology, These are the
new things that we can name creatures after and then
I don't know, it's also probably in some cases a
little bit of the Hey, if I name this after
a certain Pokemon, maybe more people will pay attention to
my findings in the study. And you know, you could

(56:30):
maybe spend that and say, well that maybe you're exploiting
the Pokemon. But I mean, it's also coming back to
what we were talking about earlier, like people take people's
that take the take the fascination people have with Pokemon,
and that certainly the children have with Pokemon, and if
you can get them a little more interested in the
actual science it's going out there in the actual, actual

(56:51):
natural world. Not only is that great, like that's in
the original spirit of the generation of Pokemon.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
So I'm all for it. Yeah, Oh yeah, I was
going to say the same thing. I can't prove this,
and I'm certainly not saying this with any negative implications,
but my guess is that sometimes naming species after Pokemon
could be a bid to get some attention to the research. Yeah,
because you know, of course, if you are just documenting

(57:21):
in a kind of dry and standard way, if you're
documenting fourteen new species of bee or spider, somewhere that
is useful information to the field, but it's probably not
going to get noticed at all in the mainstream press
or you know, not a lot of people outside of
the field are going to pay attention to it. But
if you name something after a Pokemon, you instantly tap
into a large fan base of people who are like, oh,

(57:44):
I want to read about this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
Yeah, And then of course, as we've been discussing, it's
just fine, So why in the name of fine, let's
do it.

Speaker 3 (57:51):
Yeah, one more example, And this is not an exhaustive exploration,
So if you want to find all of these species
that are named after Pokemon, you can go to the
Bulbipedia or I think there's a mainstream Wikipedia list where
people have compiled these as well.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
Yeah, and there will be more after this publication, for sure,
there will be more creatures discovered and named after Pokemon.

Speaker 3 (58:12):
But the last one we're going to talk about today
is the Bulbosaurus genus. So this is a long extinct
genus of quadrupedal vertebrate called Bulbasaurus. It obviously shares a
name with the pokemon bulbasur Robigin. This is a I
don't know exactly what all of its qualities are. But
it's a little cute, four legged, cute but aggressive, little

(58:35):
four legged turtle type thing that is sort of a
plant type Pokemon has got like vines coming out of it.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
Yeah yeah yeah, And he has like a what like
a flower on his back?

Speaker 3 (58:46):
Yeah yeah. I have read conflicting statements in different sources
about whether or not this actual extinct animal is named
after the Pokemon. Some sources say it's just a coincidence.
Others say it might not be a coincidence. I don't
know if the researchers are being cute about this, but
Bulbosaurus is a genus of the thrapsid clade Designodontia, which

(59:10):
means two dog tooth, named after the fact that Desygnodonts
typically had two tusks or large protruding teeth, which looked
kind of like goofy vampire fangs from an old movie,
you know, either like big overbite tusks or fang teeth.
Desynodonts were a widespread, successful taxon that thrived during the

(59:31):
Permian era. The key species reported in this Pokemon genus
is Bulbosaurus phyloxeron. I was reading about this in a
short twenty seventeen discover article by Ian graber Steel called
part turtle, part pig, Bulbosaurus was a stout survivor. So
I'll cover a few facts from this article. The Bulbosaurus

(59:54):
phyloxeron comes the name there comes from two features. Bulbosaurus
means bulbous lizard. This comes from the fact that these
species had a large, you know, kind of domed nasal protuberants,
kind of a big old turtally beak with a raised
area at the top. And then phloxeron means leaf cutter,

(01:00:16):
presumably what it did with its beak, because these were
primarily herbivorous animals. The discoverers were German and South African researchers,
and the first big fossil find was in South Africa.
The article describes work by one of the researchers on
the team named Christian Camerer, who was comparing the fossils

(01:00:37):
and decided that Bulbosaurus was an ancestor of a family
of designodonts called gayekiids. I'm not sure if I'm saying
that right is spelled g E I K I d s.
And these were also creatures that had these big keratenized noses,
So like large honken noses up on the top of

(01:00:59):
their snout. What were these big bulbous noses for. Obviously
this involves some inference, but a leading theory cited in
this article is that they were kind of like antlers
in a way in some animals. That they may have
been a display that was used for species recognition and
sexual appeal. So it is thought likely by many researchers

(01:01:21):
looking at this that the big bulbous sore turtle beak
may have been hot. It may have been for attracting maids.
Like all looks good?

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
Yeah, well, just looking at this artist interpretation of what
they may have looked like, I mean, it's not you know,
it's not one to one with the Pokemon, but I
can I can see some possible connections, no matter how
those connections ended up being stitched together. All right, Well,
that's I think all we have to say about Pokemon today.

(01:01:49):
But we'd love to hear from everyone out there, because
obviously we have a lot of a lot of listeners
who have grown up with with Pokemon or they've been
exposed to Pokemon, certainly at different points in their lives.
You may have some feelings you may have some thoughts
right in with those thoughts and feelings. Also, if there
are other species, even newly discovered, maybe it'll be a
headline tomorrow about a new species that is now named

(01:02:13):
after a pokemon. Right in with that, let's talk about it.
We can bring it up on a future listener mail episode.
Just a reminder for everyone out there, Stuff to Blow
your Mind is a podcast. We've been an audio podcast
for quite a while, so you can find a vast
archive of past episodes wherever you get your audio podcasts.
Our current rhythm is basically we do two core episodes

(01:02:35):
per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short form episode
on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns,
so just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
And hey, if you are listening to us in audio
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(01:03:05):
getting in the audio feed, except with the video element added.
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Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
That's right, play us in bars whatever floats your books?

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Okay? Is that everything?

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
I believe?

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
That's it. Okay, so huge, Thanks as always to our
excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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