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Plant Incorporation in Bulbasaurids

    Bulbasaurids are an ideal example of how Grass-type pokémon incorporate non-pokémon organisms¹. While most Grass-types have incorporated non-Pokémon chloroplasts into their bodies ancestrally, some Grass-type pokémon such as the bulbasaurids perform macro-level integration with plants in order to photosynthesize.

    A bulbasaur hatches with a portion of its back still in the state of energetic flux maintained within the egg.This state may persist for hours, but typically the guardian of the egg (whether one of the ‘parents’, a chansey, or an informed human) immediately introduces a plant seed to the area. The area then precipitates into solid form, and the seed germinates as it would in soil. A variety of structures within the bulbasaur’s skin begin integrating the plant into the vital matrix of the bulbasaur, nourishing the seed while also allowing it to undergo the vital transformations that occur when entering a pokéball, evolving, etc.

    At this stage, the seed or bulb will retain almost all of the other qualities associated with non-pokémon organisms, including a base-pair genetic structure, relative resistance to the effects of type essence, and so on. Well into the ivysaur stage, the plant continues to produce sugar via photosynthesis, which is in turn consumed by the bulbasaur and converted into type essence. Only later do ivysaur and venusaur incorporate the plant thoroughly enough that it will begin synthesizing Grass-type essence directly. This arrangement is less efficient than the direct-essence chloroplasts used by many other Grass pokémon. This suggests that bulbasaurids are perhaps locked into an older system that was utilized by Grass types before chloroplast integration propagated throughout the type. Bulbasaurids display a number of features that indicate that they may be an ancient lineage, similar to relicanth.

    Bulbasaur are usually inculcated with a ‘miracle seed’, a flowering plant that has no close relatives. They are difficult to grow in soil, but undergo absorption into a bulbasaur’s biology very quickly, readily feeding on grass-type essence. The parent typically produces this seed from their own plant. The minority of bulbasaur that are sown with other types of seeds gain weight more slowly and require more food, but are usually not unhealthy and can often utilize phytotoxins in some plants to augment the more typical poison-type toxins they produce naturally.

¹ See chapter 2 of Interstitial Biology in Pokémon and the fourth volume of Typology of Types: A Primary Primer. See also the recent case study of mushroomless paras published in Pochébotanique 182.