Welcome to the Alolan Islands, a land of beauty and adventure,
where you can do all of your favourite island activities,
battle intercontinental crime syndicates,
enter wormholes to other dimensions,
and collect stickers...
Stickers?
Weirdest vacation ever!
[Game Theory Intro theme]
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory!
Where my Alola form is a sunburned tourist wearing board shorts and a fanny pack.
Hey, it's time for new Pokémon game!
Which means it's also time to dig into
ecological sciences to dissect the outlandish shenanigans Nintendo is trying to shove down our faces this time.
And let me assure you,
Shenanigans are indeed afoot the Alolan Archipelago
because Game Freak has made decisions in the Pokémon Sun and Moon games
that foretell a tragic future for all the cute cuddly creatures
that you've come to know and love in the series.
Decisions that actually mean catastrophic things for the ecology of this tropical paradise.
In short, there is a slow poison that was purposely placed in the lore of Pokémon Sun and Moon
that practically guarantees that some of your all-time favorite Pokémon
go extinct on these islands.
You heard that right,
Pokémon Extinction!
An unintended consequence of something that was intentionally programmed into these games.
So what is this undiscovered threat and which Pokémon are fated to face the genetic axe?
That is what we're exposing today.
With seven generations of games and
805 total Pokémon before even including mega evolutions and Alola forms,
it's easy to assume that the creators of these games are just mindlessly pumping out new designs to fill their roster of merchandisable plushies
And looking at some of the creative decisions they've made you might be justified in thinking that.
Honey, I can't find my keys!
Oh, wait, here they are...
Agrh, never mind, it was just Klefki, I'm still missing those keys
Other dishonorable mentions Dugtrio with crappy weaves,
living sand castle, and Pedobear,
Who, if the design didn't already clue you in that they were phoning it in, has the name
Bewear. Be Wear (Beware).
Ladies and gentlemen give it up for Pokémon,
the highest grossing media franchise in history
That's no exaggeration, by the way. Pokémon beats out Star Wars at number two.
Pokémon has earned 55 billion dollars, topping Star Wars as total of 42 billion dollars,
and you have none other than quality designs like Bewear to thank for that.
*Still looking for those keys, though*
Anyway, although some may be a bit phoned in, others demonstrate that a lot of thought actually went into these designs and backstory.
Casing point, the Alolan Pokédex entry for Donald Trump.
I mean, Yungoos. You can tell the difference because Yungoos' hair looks more realistic.
Anyway
The Pokédex tells us that despite the fact that Yungoos debuted in generation 7 with the release of Sun and Moon,
it's not actually native to the Alolan region.
[PokeDex] Yungoos did not originally live in Aloha, but was imported from another region.
According to Nintendo, Yungoos was introduced to the Alolan region to deal with the exploding Rattata population.
Which, as anyone who's ever played a Pokémon game before can tell you, Rattata overpopulation is a major problem.
Seriously. Kill them all, Yungoos! Go get'em!
Unfortunately, introducing Yungoos to Alola didn't curb the Rattata's numbers
so much as drive them into the urban areas of the islands and forced them to become nocturnal,
giving birth to the Alolan variant of Rattata, which is now a dark type.
This, in turn, helps them to survive since Yungoos is active during the day.
And how impressive is that?
All of that thought just to explain a simple new Pokémon form
I mean, love or hate these games, you gotta hand it to the Pokémon team. They really thought that one through.
Except they didn't think it through far enough.
Because in creating this backstory Game Freak has actually put a death sentence
on thousands of innocent Pokémon across the Alolan Islands.
You see, Yungoos being imported into Alola means that it's technically an invasive species
In real life, an invasive species is any living organism, plant or animal, that's not native to an ecosystem
And while that may not sound all that threatening,
approximately 42% of all endangered species on Earth
are on those at-risk lists because of an invasive species that wound up in its part of the world.
What happens is that this new invasive species doesn't have natural predators in that part of the world.
And as a result, it can breed and spread quickly, taking over the area.
And since local plants and animals haven't had to deal with this creature before,
they haven't evolved defense mechanisms against it.
In just the short amount of time the invasive species takes over,
causing the underprepared local wildlife to go extinct.
So yeah, good job, humans, you brought Yungoose to Alola to eat Rattata,
Rattata adapted and found a way to survive,
which means that now you're left with a huge population of Yungoos that have to eat something else
and are gonna find it no matter what.
After all, as the Pokédex entry says,
[Pokédex] With its sharp fangs it will bite anything. It wanders around in a never-ending search for food.
Which means that someone else is on the chopping block.
And you know it's gonna be one of those cute little ones. But to find out exactly which "mons" get the munch,
we need a trip to the history books.
You see, the Yungoos-Rattata fiasco actually has parallels to the real world.
In the 1800s, Hawaii, yeah, the Hawaii that Pokémon's Alola region happens to be based on,
had problems with wild rats eating crops.
The croppers solution to this was to import mongooses to deal with them
Yungoos... Mongoose
Hey, I said the Pokémon team did their homework,
I didn't necessarily say they didn't plagiarize
Anyway, the mongoose situation might have worked out if it weren't for the fact that the mongoose,
which hunt during the day, seldom crossed paths with the nocturnal rodents that were only active at night
*slow clap*
Slow clap, humanity, slow clap.
Next time you think about importing a foreign species and upsetting the balance of an entire local ecosystem
and potentially sending a bunch of animals into permanent extinction
Maybe you should do your homework first.
And to this day the mongoose continue to be a problem across most of the Hawaiian Islands
So what did the mongooses target for food instead of the rats?
Well, basically anything. Small mammals reptiles, insects,
but most of all, the eggs and hatchlings of ground nesting birds and endangered sea turtles.
In fact, in Puerto Rico the mongoose has been the cause of at least seven amphibian and reptile extinctions
and in Jamaica was the primary cause of the extinction of a lizard, a snake, two birds, and a species of rats.
Now, I tracked all the areas Yungoos appear across Alola and let me tell you, it's everywhere.
Routes 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, you can already start to see how this invasive species is
literally taking over the entirety of Melemele and Akala islands.
And that's not even the fullest extent of this.
Its evolved form, Gumshoos, is everywhere late game.
Appearing on routes 10, 11, 15, 16, and 17
Otherwise known as the entirety of Ula'ula island.
In short, this isn't just one island's wildlife at risk,
it is the entire ecology of the whole Alolan Archipelago that's about to suffer a massive multi species extinction.
Then, knowing that Yungoos prefer to hunt close to the ground and only during the day,
I eliminated any Pokémon who were active at night or tended to stay on trees
Lastly, there were a ton of bug Pokémon across all of these routes, but bugs have huge populations.
And it would be difficult for Yungoos to really damage the overall numbers of those populations,
So, I didn't really consider them at risk.
In the end I was left with the following list of Pokémon that will in the near future
be completely wiped out from the islands by the overpopulation of Yongoos and Gumshoos
Slowpoke (NOT SLOWPOKE!!!!), Vullaby, Delibird, and brace yourself, 'cause here come real fan favourites,
Igglybuff, Pichu and Eevee.
Every single one of these Pokémon species will be wiped clean from the Alolan islands unless something is done to combat the Yungoos infestation.
That is six entire species suddenly gone from an ecosystem
You can bet that's gonna throw some food chains into chaos
Luckily, all of them are species that appear elsewhere in the Pokémon world so no one species would truly be gone forever or at least
not gone forever solely because of Yungoos because that's not where the story ends.
Yungoos is only one of the invasive species
brought on to Alola by humans.
For example, according to the Dex entry in Pokémon Sun
Grimer was "brought in to solve a problem with garbage, developed over time into this form."
Besides the difference in color, look at those teeth.
The Pokédex entry from Moon would tell us that those are actually quote lumps of
Quote: "... lumps of toxins. If one falls off, lethal poisons leak out."
So, the second species insertend onto these islands by humans
just so happens to contain lethal poisons.
and since Grimers are specifically used to treat polluted wastewater,
You can bet that those toxic crystals are gonna do a lot of damage to the sea life around Hou'oli City and the cape of Ula'ula island
Then there's Makuhita, also brought into the region by humans.
These guys trained themselves by slamming their bodies into trees.
The plant life around Route 2 is absolutely gonna suffer under his body slams.
That, in turn, affects the nesting sites for birds found there like Spearow.
And lastly, perhaps the single biggest threat to the islands, Meowth
*Meow, that's right*
Yet again, the Pokédex tells us:
"This Pokémon was not originally found in Alola. Human action caused a surge in their numbers, and they went feral."
Honestly, it's another story ripped straight from Hawaii
where feral cats have established populations on all eight of the main Hawaiian Islands.
In fact wild cats are listed among the most harmful invasive species globally by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Contributing to the extinction of 33 species.
Each year wild cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds.
Meowth invasion in Alola meanwhile means even more likelihood that bird pokemons start diminishing in number.
Absolutely putting Pikipek on the menu and, since it shares some routes with Yungoos, basically ensuring the disappearance of Pichu.
Way to treat your series mascot their Pokémon.
Seems like even Game Freak is sick of Pikachu at this point
In short, the Alolan ecosystem is just flat-out screwed
We already know that there's a high probability that six species will fall victim to the Yungoos alone
and who knows how many others will suffer similar fates thanks to the non-native Grimers, Makuhitas, and Meowths.
It used to be that the phrase "Gotta catch 'em all!" was just for completionists looking to fill out their Pokédex.
But in Alola the phrase takes on a whole new meaning.
Gotta catch 'em all! All the individual members of the invasive species
Because if you don't, the ecosystem of these islands will be permanently ruined.
Who knew that game about cuddly creatures would continue to be so incredibly depressing.
But hey! That's just a theory!
A Game Theory!
Thanks for watching!
You know what's not going extinct anytime soon?
Quality Pokémon theories!
Hit that subscribe button to make sure that you catch 'em all.
And if you want to learn more about how natural selection has affected the designs of individual Pokemon species across these series of games
Well, then click the box to the right.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think Hello Neighbor is coming out soon. Huh.