Briefing chat: Pokémon turns 30 — how Pikachu and pals inspired generations of researchers

0:03Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast, our regular Friday show. joining me as always is nick petrich how nick how you doing today i'm doing well thank you ben excited to get into it well exciting stuff today because today the 27th of february if you're listening to this the day it goes out is the 30th anniversary of pokemon the original gameboy game was released back on the 27th of february 1996 and in this show we're going to take a little look at how pokemon and science have intersected and we've got an expert on board to do it with us Miriam Nadaf I choose you hello Ben great to be on the show it's my first time in the Friday show well it's great to have you with us now we'll say you're in the presence of two Pokemon expert trainers me and Nick here but you have been looking a lot at this intersection before we get into that I think I have to know tell me both what's your favorite Pokemon if you say Mr.

0:58Mime I'm ending the show right now no it's not my favorite Pokemon is Psyduck it's the psychic That is an excellent choice. My choice would have to be Charizard, which is a very, very boring choice. But I remember getting the very first shiny Charizard in that starter Pokemon deck that many people will have had. And it stuck with me since then. Nice. Well, people say you never forget your first. And I will go the same. I think Squirtle for me. Pokemon Blue on the original Game Boy. Put a lot of time into that when I was a student. Instead of going to lectures, then my house got burgled and so did the Game Boy.

1:28So that's where we kind of left it. Anyway, this crossing over between Pokemon and science is something you've been looking at a lot. And in fact, you were over in Chicago last week meeting a researcher who said that Pokemon, the pocket monsters, were maybe something that sparked an idea in him about natural history. That's true. So last week I was in Chicago and I visited the Field Museum there, which is hosting an exhibition for the first time in the US about fossils and Pokemon. and the exhibition will feature some of the Pokemons that were inspired by or based on real animals as well as the real fossils that they were based on.

2:03So the curators really hope that people will see how the world of Pokemon and the world of science come in together and how they influenced each other over the years. And speaking of influences of Pokemon on science and vice versa, being an insect biologist back in the day, I kind of have an idea that Pokemon itself was inspired by collecting insects. That is right. So the creator of the Pokemon, Satoshi Tajiri, used to collect insects and tadpoles as a hobby during his childhood. And as Ben said, the franchise started as video games and they included 151 Pokemon. Now there are more than a thousand Pokemon.

2:41And it seems like that collecting element obviously is central to the games and the trading cards and the cartoons and the movies and all the rest of it. And there are parallels here with taxonomy, right, and classification and essentially organising things in the tree of life. And academic work has been done to try and make a phylogenetic tree of Pokemon. Yeah, so this was a fun experiment that Matt and Shalumi and his colleagues did in 2012. And they published an article in a science humour magazine about their experiment where they analysed the evolution relationship of 646 Pokémon. And when they ran the data that they collected from the website and from the game, from the TV series, through an actual phylogenetic software, what they got surprisingly was a realistic-looking phylogenetic tree.

3:33And according to their analysis, the Pokémon life started in water and Pokémon similar to lampreys and bony fishes were among the earliest to reach their present state. That is very cool. But that is also something that, on the flip side, has been somewhat criticised, this evolution of Pokemon. Because in the game, you battle the Pokemon together, they gain experience, and then they level up and transform into different shapes. Absolutely. So the reason for this, Nick, is because biological evolution happens within populations rather than individuals. And it also takes place over successive generations.

4:07whereas in the Pokemon world an individual Pokemon transforms suddenly and we see the changes at an individual level and some people have said that the process could be closer to metamorphosis rather than evolution but even so metamorphosis in reality also happens over a very long time unlike the sudden transformation that we see with the Pokemon characters. And I must say the first time this happened to me when I was I think six years old when I first played it scared the life of me because I had no idea what was happening. And I was like, oh, cool, stronger Pokemon. It was a Bulbasaur transforming into an Ivysaur.

4:44But, you know, I must say that for me, playing Pokemon was kind of inspiring. Like it certainly made me interested in the natural world a bit more. And that seems like that's something that's mirrored by a lot of scientists in your article. Well, yeah, for many researchers, especially biologists watching the TV series or playing the video game or training cards have been a big part of their childhood. Some of them still play Pokemon Go, for example. And for many, Pokemon was also an inspiration to do the science that they do today because it sparked their curiosity and love to discover new species or name new species and work with animals.

5:22Well, you mentioned naming there, Miriam. Of course, I made a document about how species are named. And I know that species can be named after all sorts of things. And it came as no surprise to me that there are many species named after various Pokemon. We've talked about the fossils there. And there are many fossils that have been named after Pokemon. That's true. So in 2023, a group of paleontologists discovered that some fossils from the dinosaurs era that were found in Colombia and had long thought to be plants were actually baby marine turtles. and the group of paleontologists who made the discovery nicknamed them Turturig after the Pokemon character that is half turtle and half plant.

6:05But it's not just fossils. Living animals are also named after Pokemon. For example, I spoke with Spencer Monckton, who is a research scientist at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics in Canada. And back in 2013, when he was still pursuing his master's degree, he spent several months driving around Chile, collecting bees, and his research was focused on a particular subgenus of bees which are called heterodicillus and these bees are commonly known as polyester bees because of the substance that they secrete into the walls of their nest cells that dries into a smooth cellophane-like lining. So after collecting specimen in Chile, Moncton went back to his lab and analysed some of the bees using a microscope to perform a morphological examination, and he also used DNA sequencing techniques.

6:57He identified eight new species of these bees, and one of them had a very long face that was drawn out like the snout of a dragon. And when he picked up the very first specimen of this species, its body was discolored. So instead of having yellow markings, the yellow had changed to orange, probably because of the substances that were used to preserve the specimen. So Moncton decided to name it after the Pokemon Charizard, the red draconic Pokemon that breathes fire. And last year, Moncton got a tattoo of the bee on his arm. I mean, I'm going to have to check out A, the picture of the tattoo, if it exists, and a picture of this bee, because that sounds amazing and happens to be my favourite Pokemon.

7:43But it's not just like going out into the world that Pokemon has inspired, it's helped researchers teach people about the natural world as well, right? That's right. So back in 2010, some researchers designed a Pokemon-inspired card game, which is open source and anybody can access it, and they named it the Fido Training Card Game. But this time, the cards included flora and fauna in different regions around the world, from mammals, reptiles, insects, plants, and even microbes. And the idea was to use this game as a tool to teach people about the interplay between different ecosystems and the organisms that live in there.

8:22And that shows the way that Pokemon has touched science and science has touched Pokemon. But there's one more example that I really wanted to talk about that I really wasn't expecting. And it's how folk have been using Pokemon to expose predatory journals. So these are journals that publish papers for a fee, but don't necessarily perform quality control check. So there's something that folk are looking to root out. So this is my favourite part, Ben. I spoke with Matan Shilomi, who told me about how he used Pokemon to raise awareness about predatory journals. So in 2019, he began writing dozens of fake papers with made-up references and made-up co-authors, including some characters from Pokemon, such as Professor Samuel Oak.

9:05And he started submitting these fake papers to journals that contacted him, and he suspected that they were predatory. Then when Shilomi checked these journals, he found that some of the papers he sent ended up being published. And what sorts of things was he including when he was writing these papers offered by the likes of Professor Oak, you know, from the first Pokemon game? So there was one paper about air and water quality in the Pokemon city of Gringy, and another paper was about Jigglypuff, this Pokemon that used to send its opponents to sleep when it sings, and the paper was about the mechanism by which Jigglypuff induces sedation.

9:46And there was another paper about the expression of Pikachu-rin, this made-up protein in Pikachu, the most iconic Pokemon. And obviously one can look at this with a wry smile and say, ha-ha, we fooled these predatory journals. But what was this endeavour hoping to achieve? The idea behind Shalomi's prank was to show people how predatory journals do not check the quality of the manuscripts that they publish or even do any form of peer review. And as a matter of fact, some of the papers that ended up being published included within the text sentences such as, we prepared a gibberish loaded text that, if published, proves conclusively that the target journal is predatory.

10:27So the whole experiment was really to raise awareness of these predatory journals that they exist. And Shalomi hopes that when people visit the journal website, They would spot these fake papers and not trust these journals that publish them. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that those journals were not trying to be the very best like no one ever was. Well, let's leave it there. We'll put a link to your article, Miriam, where folk can read even more about what researchers feel about Pokemon. But for the time being, Miriam Nadaf and Nick Petrich-Howe, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having us.

11:02Thank you. I'm off to go catch some Pokemon.