Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas,
and monsters in time. My son and I recently watched the two thousand nineteen live action film Pokemon Detective Pikachu, a surprisingly watchable, big budget special effects feature that takes the world of evolving, battling cartoon monsters and blends them into a sort of Blade Runner esque future world in which exotic, cute, supernatural creatures are just a part of everyday life. Plus Bill Nigh is in it, and he's
always great. This film is, of course, an endless parade of Pokemon, some central to the plot, others merely cameos in the film. For today's Monster Fact, I'd like to talk about the Pokemon Ditto, known in Japan as Metamn. I turned to a guest researcher and writer for help on this episode, my son Sebastian. Sebastian rites Ditto the transformed Pokemon a normal type. It's weak against fighting tips. Did can we arrange its DNA to match any other Pokemon?
When In this form, it can imitate at taps to know is it Ditto do yes? Ditto who appears as a short pink blob with dots for eyes, is a shape shifter. In the movie Pokemon Detective Pikachu, we see it transform into various human characters as well as a few powerful Pokemon monsters, but especially when in human form,
the eyes give it away. As we've discussed on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, this is a frequent detail in various tales and traditions of shape shifting monsters, from dem incubi and succupy to the forest dwelling Leshy. There's always a detail that the shape shifter gets wrong. It might be uh using duck feed instead of human feed, or making the buttons backwards, but there's often something to provide the hero of our story with a chance to
see through the deceptive disguise. The natural world is home to mimics and shape shifters as well, but the most impressive maybe the mimic octopus them Octopus mimicus. While other octopus species use their chromatophores and versatile bodies to resemble parts of their environment, the mimic octopus takes on the
form of other animal species. As Norman at All pointed out in Dynamic Mimicry in an Indo Malayan Octopus, the mimic octopus takes the form of quote poisonous or distasteful animals, and these include the flatfish, the lionfish, the banded sea snake, jelly fishes, and possibly see an enemies as well. Now, I don't know what you think, but that seems like quite a diverse selection of creatures, almost as diverse as
any given page from the Pokemon Bestieri. As the researchers point out, human interpretations of potential mimicries in the mimic octopus are subjective, so we have to be careful about jumping to conclusions about what they are pretending to be. But also they continue to be the subject of scientific study. But it just goes to show that no matter how weird and amazing the monster or Pokemon may seem to be,
the natural world probably equals or exceeds it somewhere. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact or the Artifact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com MHM Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.