User:Jimbo Jambo

Welcome to my userpage, where I explain nothing about myself, save for this introductory paragraph. At the moment I'm using this as a brain dumping site for ideas which don't fit anywhere else.

Under construction

On Pikmin Biology

Pikmin being the product of someone's imagination, nothing can be said about them with any real degree of certainty, but much can be inferred from their behavior and what little information is slipped to us from in-game dialogue. Actually, in a way, the lack of real canonical information on creatures into which an enormous amount of thought and detail were obviously put makes studying Pikmin a bit like studying real animals in that nature has no guides or definitions, so it is entirely up to us to make sense of it.

Family Tree

In the absence of fossil or genetic data (I could not expect Nintendo to put that much thought into it), I've constructed a family tree of Pikmin and relatives based on observable differences and information given to us from the game.

Immediately worthy of note is the fact that I placed everything in the plant kingdom, not animal or some new kingdom, with Pikmin and relatives making up their own phylum. Though Pikmin have some animal-like features and abilities, such as free locomotion, what differentiates animals from plants is often not so much what they have, but what they don't have that plants do, such as chlorophyll photosynthesis (save like one or two species of animal plankton). Whereas evolving such things would require a great leap from animals, things like self-driven movement and sight, if even only in some bare, basic form, are already possessed by more than a handful of plants. Not only that, but certain features such as Pikmin flowers which seem to serve no purpose could be considered throwbacks from a plant origin.

Most of the other taxonomic groupings shown in the tree should be pretty self-explanatory. I wanted to separate parasitic Bulbmin from all the other Pikmin species, and since I was already separating subterranean "Candypop-only" Pikmin from Onion-dwelling ones by genus, I created a subfamily for Bulbmin just under the Pikmin family.

Subpages

See User:Jimbo Jambo/notes for ship part notes.