Is it possible to find pokemon in nature?

Pokemon Go has driven people crazy. But in the pokemon themselves are not so many crazy. It turns out that there are creatures that have almost the same superpowers. In reality, they are mortal, so I had to evolve in order to survive. What is this Pokemon, see the new release of IQ! Video and decoding under the cut.


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Once again, the world went crazy about pokemon. In my memory for the first time it happened when I was in elementary school. Then everyone started to watch the Pokemon cartoons uncontrollably, and many also bought themed albums with stickers. I remember being very happy, because my brother and I were the first in class to fill out an album. There were two of us - and it was twice as easy for us to cope with the stickers.

Pokemon and school knowledge

It is obvious that many of the ideas of the authors of the Pokemon universe were inspired by real animals. But some were absolute fiction. But even fiction can have unexpected real prototypes.
Let's start with the simple. It is clear that Charmander and his evolution to Charizard is a variation on the theme of dragons. And in the real world no animals can blaze with fire. It is also obvious that there is nothing unusual in some Piggy or Squirtle. A squirtle even spits out water more or less realistically - just like a striped sprinkler fish. And everything is clear about Pikachu - everyone knows about electric eels and stingrays. You may even remember the work recently published in the journal Science. In this work, an electric eel attacked a plastic crocodile model. This, of course, not lightning Pikachu, but still.

In addition to such obvious cases, there are analogies with the real world and more exotic. Example - Bulbasaurus. It would seem complete nonsense and fiction - a hybrid of animal and plant. There is no such thing! We all know from school that these are different kingdoms of living nature. And they differ from each other fundamentally - even at the cellular level. In plants, unlike animals, there is a cell wall of cellulose, large accumulating vacuoles and chloroplasts. And animals, on the other hand, have a cell center that controls the process of division. Yes, and animal and plant cells are divided in different ways.

How are plants different from animals?

At the level of whole organisms there are also many differences - animals move, plants do not. Well, or almost not. Plants can slightly rotate different parts of the body, but cannot move from place to place. The growth of animals is more or less given a rigid genetic program, plants grow throughout life. Animals quickly and actively respond to environmental changes, plants - slowly. Animals have a nervous system, and their cells can conduct electrical impulses. Plants use only chemical signals.
And finally, there is the most important difference in terms of the biosphere as a whole. Animals consume only pre-existing organic food. Plants, in turn, can produce it themselves.

What do the pranoids dream of

Bulbasaurus combines these properties. He can actively move and react to the surrounding world, but at the same time he is able to photosynthesize. It turns out that such a creature is found in wildlife. The name of this strange monster is Elysia Chlorotica.

Elysia is a sea slug that lives on the American Atlantic coast. This slug, like Bulbasaurus, is an animal that can photosyntyrrate! In the Pokemon universe, it doesn’t say whether Bulbasaurus possesses its abilities from birth - there is little known about the birth and growth of Pokemon.

But about Elysia, we know more. Young individuals of Elysia immediately after they cease to be larvae begin to actively feed on the algae of Vaucheria litorea. Elysia pierces his radula (as the sharp part of the mouth apparatus is called in mollusks) the threads of Vaucheria, and then begins to suck the contents. The most important thing is that Vaucheria is not completely digested. Algae chloroplasts are absorbed by the cells of the digestive system of the mollusk, but are not digested inside the cells, but are assimilated and begin to actively function. And they are embedded thorough.

Experiments have shown that chloroplasts can live in Elysia cells for about ten months. And more is not necessary - this is the life of an average mollusk individual. So with the help of chloroplasts, Elysia begins to receive food not as all animals known to science, but as plants. Such a miracle of nature! Just a dream pranoedov.

"Pokémon firmly settled in the scientific culture"

In fact, as it turned out, Elysia is not just not completely digesting algae. In order for chloroplasts to work normally in plant cells, some of the genes necessary for this are not inside the chloroplasts, but inside the nuclear genome of the cell. Recall that chloroplasts have their own DNA. So, in Elysia one of the exclusively plant nuclear genes was found. And the search for the rest continues.

Of course, unlike Bulbasaurus, Elysia cannot throw out long and biting lianas for attack. Especially to shoot cutting leaves. And in general it’s not a fact that the creators of Pokemon knew about such a biological wonder at all! But it is still surprising that fantasies from the world of Pokemon are not all that fantasy.

In conclusion, I want to say that Pokemon settled firmly in the world culture. And even in the scientific! So, in 2008, a group of Japanese scientists from the Osaka Institute called the retinal protein they discovered, Pikachurin, in honor of Pikachu. And before that, in 2005, Nintendo had threatened a trial with a group of scientists who called one of the genes associated with the development of certain types of cancer with the Pokémon. As a result, the gene had to be renamed to the non-sounding version of Zbtb7. Although a number of scientific articles in which this gene is called "Pokemon", managed to get out. And you can even find them on the Internet.

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The text was prepared by Ekaterina Shutova.