Dear Nintendo, hi, it's me, Austin
and I'm here to accomplish two very
important things today. One, find out where all the starter Pokemon are
And two, finally make peace with all the Bulbasaur fans who are still mad that I omitted
Bulbasaur from the list of Gen 1 starters when Matt and I Deadlocked over a year ago by making this entire
episode about:
Bulbasaur!
Okay, well that's technically not true, because this episode is actually about all starter Pokemon, not just Bulbasaur
but almost all of them share
the exact same
mechanics when it comes to what I'm talking about today from Gen one all the way to Gen...
Uhhh...
Now.... um--
Okay, so they did slightly change in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon,
but only slightly and not in a way that really matters for this episode, so you can sub in any
starters from any game and it will still be relevant today.
But, today we're gonna use Bulbasaur cuz I'm a Gen one-r and
they're cute for a frog with a plant growing out of it.
*cue dramatic music*
Anyway as a Gen one-r who has been playing since the original games were first released in the United States
I have been obsessed with finding out why starter Pokemon are so rare. I mean like in my head
I know it's because it's a game mechanic where they have to make the first
Pokemon you get feel special to you and not make it any run-of-the-mill
Garbage rat you can find ten minutes after stepping outside your front door, but that part in the Pokedex where it says area unknown
haunted me in a world filled with rumors of Mews being able to be caught behind the truck near the SS Anne, and a--
What was it the uncle of a friend of yours in school said if you could just get behind Bill's house you could catch
Every rare Pokemon in the game and get infinite eevee's or something?
Anyway.
It was a young Internet and none of us quite realized that anybody could write just about anything on game Sage's with little to no
Repercussions and rumors about secret areas where you could find all the starters if you just completed the right steps remain
Chiseled into my brain for years after I stopped playing Pokemon regularly.
Someday, I'd break into Bill's secret garden and find tall grass filled with
Charmander's and Squirtles and that area-unknown entry in the Pokedex would finally
disappear and I'd get to have the ultimate
answer to the rock-paper-scissors
dilemma that oak forces upon you within the very first minutes of the game.
But, alas, the rumors were just lies.
Aside from some very specific exploits and hacks,
once you pick your starter and your rival picks theirs, you will never run into any other Pokemon of that species again.
That is until the breeding mechanic was introduced in generation 2 and it's here where the burning
question in the back of my mind came rocketing back into my imagination:
starter Pokemon are of course breedable if you locate a Ditto
But what's more interesting is with the breeding mechanics Game Freak introduced an entirely new design
component into their games that simultaneously
raises more questions, but also
Itself begins to answer the question that has haunted me for over 20 years:
why starter Pokemon so rare? Because they're going extinct.
And how do I know this? Because of sex.
I'm talking about biological sex here. Not the act of sexual intercourse even though that
presumably has a role to play here, which I am NOT going to get into
*saucy music*
I said I wasn't going to get into! Ok, ok!
For the sake of time, we're to skip over
Sexless Pokemon and say that in order to breed a Pokemon you either need to have two
Pokemon of the same species who are different sexes or a
Pokemon from the same egg group whereupon the offspring from the breeding will be the species of the female Pokemon or
You need a Ditto who can morph into anything? Okay. Got it? Good.
Because of this Pokemon need to have a sex assigned to them by the game
So when a Pokemon appears the game just flips a coin to figure out whether it's male or female, right?
Well, no for the majority of Pokemon approximately 56.24%
Yes, this would be correct over a long enough timeline. Most breedable Pokemon will have one female for every one male
This is what's known as a sex ratio and for most animals and Pokemon, it is one to one
It's hard to get exact numbers
But somewhere in the upper
90s of percents of animals on earth have a sex ratio of one to one meaning for every male
There's one female. We will get into why that is in a bit
But what's important is that this is incredibly common and what's more interesting, is that starter Pokemon?
They do not fall within this 56.24% of Pokemon with a one to one
Sex ratio starter Pokemon all of them have a sex ratio of seven to one males to females
Meaning that for every one female Pokemon born seven males are born
And it turns out that this can have disastrous
consequences to the
population of a species.
Before we get into explaining why having 0.1429 females born for every male can doom a species to extinction?
I think we first have to go over why this
One-to-one ratio is so freakin common in nature to begin with even among
Populations where only a few males actually get to breed with a multitude of females what's known as polygyny examples include gorillas
Elephant seals and high schools and believe it or not
we do have an answer and it boils down to a simple combination of mathematics and
evolutionary science
*Flight of the bumblebee plays*
So, let's take a population of Bulbasaur's and for the sake of argument say that the sex ratio
Were reversed seven females per one male
that means that the average male bulbasaur would get to mate seven times more frequently than the average female if each
Bulbasaur has one egg
That means that the male's genes get passed down seven times more than a female's genes would all else being equal
but uh-oh one of our Bulbasaur's got hit by space radiation and
Mutated and now it produces more males than females all of a sudden the children of this one Bulbasaur would have a tremendous
genetic edge in the population having a bunch of dudes that can spread its genes which means the male
dominating gene would spread like
wildfire until it got so prevalent that it was no longer an
Advantage and it was just the status quo
Now all of a sudden a mutation that produces more females than males
gets an advantage and tips the scales the other way and then this
evolutionary trade-off goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth getting smaller and smaller each time until finally it settles at
Around a one-to-one ratio. This will almost always
Happen unless a skewed sex ratio provides a definite
Evolutionary advantage like the adaptil inium genus of mites that have boiled down efficient breeding to a hard calculated science
I will spare you the details
But they have a ratio of five to eight females for every male and the Wikipedia page is well
You can look it up for yourself. It is gross and awesome
So what does this have to do with Bulbasaur and the other starters?
Well quite a bit once you start to dig into the breeding mechanics
You see one of the main issues with having a skewed sex ratio is that your species can become incredibly
Susceptible to changes in the ecosystem
usually for ratio other than one to one to stabilize the means that a species is either relying on some weird behavioral quirk or some
specific environmental factor that makes this method of procreation optimal and when you're that
Dependent upon outside elements or precarious conditions to breed sudden changes to your environment can sometimes happen too fast for
evolution to have a chance to respond and you just die out because
Nobody's making babies fast enough to replace the corpses that are piling up
Just ask the giant pandas and you know who's great at causing massive changes to the environment
Humans, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself. In order to get a solid grasp over how Pokemon breeding would work in the wild
I created a simulation in Python that used all the well-documented breeding data of Pokemon to create fake
populations for comparison Pokemon are
Well, the technical term is fecund every 255 to 257 steps depending upon a generation if you have Pokemon in the Pokemon
daycare the game runs a check versus a few different factors and if they're met it runs a
probability check that an egg is laid which can be anywhere from 20 to
88% if an egg is laid you can pick it up in your Pokemon can be immediately ready to lay another egg and
255 to
257 steps Pokemon occurs in real time given that it's tied to real-world
Day/night cycles and each step takes about point 2 seconds. Meaning a fertile Pokemon will lay on
average
840 viable eggs per day
FECUND
This 255 to 257 step period is something we're going to call a tick and it's how I calculated all my fertility comparisons
pokemon eggs hatch based on how many steps you take too, and for
55% of Pokemon species eggs
hatch in 20 ticks. Got it? Good. So basically I coded a math machine with probabilities and
Importantly a death rate. I pulled a death rate from another fecund animal species the eastern cottontail
Rabbit, which has an average mortality rate of 80 percent over a year
I boiled this down to a number of ticks since the average rabbit litter is 5 rabbits and pokemon only lay one egg this becomes an
80% mortality rate per 65 ticks
This is in the wild mind you and given the rate at which I murder Pokemon when grinding levels that checks out
So okay, I plugged all this into my code, which I mean okay, if you follow me on Twitter
I will link the github when this video goes live, but you have to promise
Ok, you promise not to mock me for the parts of my code that are not pythonic! Okay, promise me!
I'm sorry. Okay! I was in a rush!
I wanted to see if a species that had seven males per every one female would be
Totally boned given they have litters of one egg at a time. Is this even viable if all things are
Perfect? Yes. Yes, it is believe it or not
But the first Inklings of weakness appeared really early on in the very very early stages when populations were small
There was a slim but nonzero chance that all the females would die and all the eggs
They managed to lay before they died would all hatch males which would render a species extinction
Guaranteed if there were no dittos nearby
So the cracks are already starting to show. So the population is viable, great! And to cover my bases
I ran simulations on rattata's and litleo's too. Rattata's have a one-to-one ratio and litleo is the only
Pokemon species with a 7 to 1 female to male ratio
Okay, can I get those graphs to scale though?
That's better barely see poor bulbasaur down there, but that's fine
Nobody said they needed to be the most numerous species quality over quantity, right?
however
How would our Bulbasaur population fare if we introduced anything anything at all?
That impacted just the fertility rates. Not a new predator that's killing them more frequently, not less food,
Just something that disrupts their ability to breed as efficiently. Think of it as your parent knocking on your door during puberty
I built into my model a drop in fertility that occurs a little over a year into the growth of a population to see what
Happens here's the litleo population. All right seems good little hiccup here, but overall everything is pretty good
Here's rattata's, oh, they don't even care and now our starter Pokemon population
Doing okay...
Doing oh, oh no. Oh no. No, no, no, nooooooo
They're extinct!
But why? Well, because there's so much risk
Concentrated into one sex and it's the sex that creates eggs
The reason the reverse ratio has almost no problems at all is because it's like a bunch of egg
Fertilizers die off and don't get to breed. It's not that big of a deal
There's still plenty of egg makers and one egg fertilizer
Can if he is prolific and has a high charisma score fertilize every female in a species in fact
Pokemon stacks the deck even further because even if all the males of a species dies through some horrible
Bad luck. The species can still breed with a male from the same egg group
So the obliteration of a species really requires that all the females die
which is what makes this 1 to 7 female to male ratio so cataclysmically
Damming if anything shows up that makes this delicate balance of food resources and mates no longer work
species with either more females than males or an equal number
Can easily take the punches in stride and work to adapt to the changing climate?
It may be a struggle,
but they will at least have one less thing to worry about when it comes to breeding but
Species like Bulbasaur and the other starters? they are
Totally screwed if something sudden happens that permanently alters the breeding conditions like I don't know
Decreased grasslands for privacy more spaced out breeding grounds or increased lighting at night
Their species will be long dead before a random
Mutation has time to show up and give them a chance to adapt to the new environment and who is really really good at
Dramatically and permanently altering environments and ways that impact local wildlife?
Humans. This isn't some hippy dippy
Observation this is just an objective,
Observable fact humans as a body are amazing at changing the world around them to suit their needs
Agriculture, diverting rivers and yes even lights at night can cause whole species to go extinct. There is a direct positive
correlation between the human population and the number of species that go extinct even something as simple as electronic lighting can
Tremendously disrupt the behaviors of nocturnal animals by turning night time into daytime and on
Evolutionary timelines these advances are super new. Evolution can take thousands of years to adapt to new environments
And animals that rely on millions of years of predictability can be thrown for a loop when one human goes
hey, what if I invented the lightbulb and 20 years later BAM! light everywhere and now baby sea turtles are like
"Where do I go"? I'm supposed to follow the moon, but the moon is literally everywhere and just like real life
there are some species in the Pokemon universe that basically don't care and are barely impacted and others like
Bulbasaur, they're practically nowhere to be found. The only examples we can find in-game are in captivity
Which means even though they don't say it what Professor Oak and the other professor trees are actually doing is conservation
They're trying to save a dying species from Total Annihilation
Which you know seems like maybe handing them out to ten year olds. Maybe is the best idea
Maybe it is I don't know we can release a hell of a lot of Pokemon into the wild while we're grinding for shiny pokemon
With perfect IVs. So what does this mean? It means that well Bulbasaur actually is
special, it's one of the last of a handful of its species. A species of Pokemon that can now only
Survive in captivity, even if you take the anime Canon is true that there are breeding farms and preserves for starter Pokemon
This does not debunk this idea that starter Pokemon can only thrive under very controlled conditions and are one natural disaster
Away from total annihilation all because of humanity so, you know cherish your starter Pokemon
they really are one of a kind and you know find a Ditto and breed that thing like crazy because just like the giant
Pandas in China. We desperately need these Pokemon to fu-
sincerely, Austin
eggplant