Wishiwashi
Scholae milibus alola

Overview

As the possibility of invasion loomed over Alola in the War of the Pacific, Governor Olson proclaimed that the territory was a wishiwashi: a myriad of people who would band together as one to resist those who dared attack them. His prediction proved correct: Alola's people and the soldiers stationed there rallied to keep the territory in American hands. The wishiwashi has since become the mascot of the naval bases on the island and many of Alola's sports teams.

Unfortunately, fish pokémon are difficult to keep on the island challenge. A whole school of wishiwashi magnifies the challenges of raising a single fish. Stationary trainers with the funds and space for a large enough tank or pool may find a small shoal of wishiwashi to be good pets. Professionals with no shortage of funds, skill, and ambition try their hand at taming a school. Those who succeed are rewarded with one of the most powerful threats in the ocean.

Physiology

Wishiwashi are classified as pure water-types.

Individuals are counter-shaded with light silvery scales on their bottom half and dark blue scales on the top. A series of large white scales cover the lateral line.

Wishiwashi schools are much, much larger. Their entire body is dark blue. It is shaped like a large predatory fish, but it has a deeper body form than individuals. The dorsal fin is detached and made up of a series of fish-like entities that form the rough shape of a dorsal fin. The school is wholly unable to eat or perform any important biological functions other than breathing. They possess large white eyes that do not serve any purpose beyond intimidation. Wishiwashi schools exclusively sense the world through water, including that within living creatures.

Individual wishiwashi grow to lengths of 14 inches and weights of five ounces. Schools can reach lengths of thirty feet and weigh up to 1,350 pounds. Wishiwashi can live for up to fourteen years in the wild.

Behavior

Wishiwashi live in shoals of two to four thousand fish. They feed by swimming through the water with their mouths open. Zooplankton such as copepods are caught in the water entering their mouth and moving towards their gills. There they are intercepted by gill rakers, small strands that catch any zooplankton coming through and direct it down the esophagus. Wishiwashi swim near constantly in slow loops around the islands. Their swimming speed slows at night as they enter a resting state.

Individuals are prime targets for many predators due to their small size and high nutritional value. When they come under attack, wishiwashi begin to move together and congregate into a school. Once the school has formed it will set about punishing whatever dared to prey on the individuals in the shoal. Even gyarados learn that it is not worth preying upon wishiwashi.

The species still has some predators in Alola. Sharpedo are known to rush into the middle of a school, eat what they can, and quickly swim away before a school can form. Schools are rather slow and sharpedo can easily outrun them. Long distance water-type attacks can be dodged by momentarily leaping above the surface as they pass. Other predators can entirely negate the ability to school and prey upon the individual wishiwashi without fear of serious retaliation. Lumineon's flashing lights, bruxish's telepathic attacks, and noivern's sonic blasts can disrupt the concentration of a school, causing it to collapse.

Wishiwashi can mostly avoid these threats. Sharpedo are uncommon in Alola outside of the waters of Poni Island. Bruxish seldom leave reefs. Lumineon only surface once a month far offshore and can be avoided by moving closer to the coast. Wishiwashi previously used to live further out to sea where noivern would be reluctant to strike due to the long swim back. The decline in noivern populations has allowed the shoals to move closer to the shore over time.

Husbandry

Wishiwashi can be captured while schooling. This allows the entire school to be held in one ball. Almost every league allows for wishiwashi to be used as one pokémon, even when thousands of individuals are used. Stasis balls are far preferable to habitat balls for this. The latter can result in disorientation and difficulties swimming for a short time after release.

Since wishiwashi only shoal when threatened they will spend most of their time separated into individuals. A large pool, sea pen, or pond will be needed to hold a full shoal of wishiwashi. Large tanks (1,000 gallons or more) can be used for smaller shoals of up to thirty or forty individuals. Ponds should ideally be free of larger fish that could stress the fish into schooling. Full shoals prefer their enclosure to be at least ten feet deep and at least fifty feet long by twenty feet wide. Larger ponds are better, of course. Some aquarists recommend building an aviary or greenhouse over the pond to keep out birds or other potential stressors. This is only practical for top-tier professional trainers or very wealthy hobbyists.

It is best to feed wishiwashi by training them to associate a lure with feeding. The fish will then move towards that lure and swim with mouths wide open in anticipation of food. Brine shrimp can then be sprinkled over a fairly broad area near it. Dropping it in one plume ensures that most will sink to the bottom well before enough fish can snap it up. Feed enough that all fish maintain their weight and remain active swimmers. If the fish schools with any regularity more food will be required. Some outdoor ponds and sea pens fed with natural seawater can develop their own copepod populations capable of supporting a shoal with little to no additional food. This is especially true for larger enclosures.

Wishiwashi socialize among themselves. Shoals can learn to tolerate humans. Getting to the point where they obey commands is trickier. Coming to view cooperation as a reliable source of food and other luxuries (larger spaces, additional protection) helps.

Farmers raising wishiwashi for food usually wish to avoid schooling. This can be averted by harvesting them before adulthood or keeping fewer than five hundred individuals in each pond.

Illness

Wishiwashi held as individuals are very prone to stress-related illnesses and death. Wishiwashi captured and raised alone have very high mortality rates. Individuals taken and held in shoals of ten to fifty have a roughly fifty percent mortality rate within the first month. Post-capture death rates for individuals captured and housed alongside their entire shoal are less than twenty percent. Mortality rates typically decline sharply after the initial capture.

Frequent schooling also raises problems. Wishiwashi cannot eat or metabolize food while in school form. Doing this too often can lead to stress related illnesses, underfeeding, and sometimes toxic shock from holding in waste. Trainers are recommended to battle with a wishiwashi school at most three times a week.

Finally, trainers should accept that wishiwashi are not particularly durable. Their survival strategy in the wild depends on having so many individuals that no predator could kill them all. An occasional individual death is no great tragedy to the shoal. If fish do get sick, they should be immediately removed from the shoal. Any infected fish will probably die due to a combination of limited veterinary experience with fish and the general frailty of the pokémon. Isolation actually makes death more likely. It is still necessary to prevent an infectious disease from killing many, many more pokémon.

Evolution

Wishiwashi do not evolve. They enter into a school form, a composite of thousands of individual fish. It is temporary and more akin to dynamax or mega evolution than to standard evolution. This process is only possible in a handful of places on earth where background levels of elemental energy are unusually high. Western Europe, Hoenn, and Alola are among the only places that meet these requirements. A wishiwashi shoal taken outside of these areas will gradually lose the ability to form schools.

The school process begins when enough wishiwashi gather in one place. The largest wishiwashi will send out a pulse that will begin the merging process. A single, massive creature will form in place of the shoal. This school form is not built for ordinary functions such as feeding, defecating, and reproducing. It is simply an extremely powerful means of defense. Once the predators have left and a message has been sent the school will collapse and individuals will swim free.

If the school takes sufficient damage, then it can break prematurely. All individuals in the shoal will be stunned for nearly a half hour after the break. Breaks caused by attacks that disrupt concentration only lead to a few seconds of disorientation.

A school requires at least one adult to activate it. Juveniles cannot form a school, regardless of how many are present.

Battle

Wishiwashi schools are some of the strongest aquatic pokémon in the world. Almost all of the world's most powerful fishkeepers live in their habitats on at least a seasonal basis just to keep a school on their team. Very few pokemon stand a chance of overpowering one in the water. Wishiwashi have access to incredibly formidable physical and elemental attacks such as massive waves and blizzards. Wishiwashi's coverage options are limited, but they still have some important moves such as earthquake and beat up at their disposal.

Some pokémon can win by disrupting the school. Individuals are too cowardly to do much but run and hide. Even if they were to fight they would stand little chance of harming a professional trainer's pokémon. Powerful telepaths such as alakazam, beheeyem, and sigilyph can break apart a school fairly quickly. Some pokémon with absurdly loud sonic attacks can achieve a similar affect. Noivern is the most notable abuser of this strategy. Some pokémon with especially potent confuse rays can also break a wishiwashi's concentration. This last tactic is mostly limited to natural bioluminescent pokémon and a handful of ghosts.

Other pokémon must exploit one of wishiwashi's two main weaknesses to win: they have a natural time limit and they are slow. The time limit can be hard to abuse in practice due to wishiwashi's power. The school lacks several important organs, leaving them very vulnerable to poisons. Some species are bulky enough to abuse it. Walls such as cloyster, gastrodon, blissey, aegislash, hyboareas, mega slowbro, or milotic can simply close their armor or begin to heal themselves while waiting for their opponent to faint.

Abusing wishiwashi's slowness can also be difficult. Some sweepers can use their speed to dodge wishiwashi's telegraphed attacks and strike back with their own powerful hits. These will eventually overwhelm the opponent. Sweepers will usually fall in one or two hits. A few quickstall pokémon can take some hits, avoid others, and gradually wear wishiwashi down.

Finally, some pokémon are so powerful that they can fight the school one-on-one. A well-trained gyarados can take on a school much more reliably than a wild one. Powerful dragons that aren't extremely vulnerable to the cold can potentially overpower wishiwashi. Electric types such as vikavolt and magnezone can take advantage of wishiwashi's typing. Some grass types with sunny day support can do the same, although most plants tend to have limited offensive power and an extreme dislike of the cold. Some Ultra Beasts and other rare-but-very-powerful pokémon can also overwhelm wishiwashi.

This may sound like a long list of counters. Do not be fooled: this is a near-complete list of the pokémon that can take on a school and win. Most professionals have one or two of the above pokémon on their team, but when those are sufficiently weakened wishiwashi can run roughshod over the remainder.

Hobbyists and island challengers will rarely have to deal with wishiwashi schools unless they go out of their way to antagonize one. This can be avoided by simply not attacking wishiwashi or riding on a predator near them.

Acquisition

Capturing wishiwashi does require antagonizing them. Particularly bold trainers aiming to capture an entire school will necessarily have to face said school. Those content with individuals can rely on a magnet recall glove to drop a ball into a wishiwashi shoal from altitude, capture something (wishiwashi individuals are unlikely to escape their ball), and then promptly raise it back up before fleeing. The DNR should be notified in advance to ensure that no one else is in the water. Wishiwashi are not particularly smart and do not often distinguish between one human who attacked them and other nearby humans.

The DNR also issues very few permits for wishiwashi capture. Trainers who cannot get a permit or do not want to risk fighting a school can simply purchase wishiwashi from aquarists. The fish are expensive due to the difficulty of acquiring them and their value as a food fish.

There are two approaches to building a school. The first is to gradually assemble one from purchased or captured individuals. When enough are obtained the shoal will be able to form a school of their own. The second is to obtain an existing school. Those few aquarists with enough wishiwashi to form a school are often unwilling to part with it. Hefty payments will be required. The alternative is to take on an entire school at once. This is occasionally permitted when a school becomes a problem to the ecosystems or the humans living nearby. Trainers who wish to capture a school can be put on a waitlist by the DNR. On average a school capture is approved once every three years.

Owning a wishiwashi shoal with fewer than five hundred individuals requires a Class II license. Owning a shoal with more than five hundred individuals requires a Class IV.

Breeding

Wishiwashi are broadcast spawners. Shoals pack tightly together. Every adult female then releases thirty to fifty thousand eggs. Males release far more sperm. The shoal will mix up the water currents to maximize the chances that eggs and sperm collide. Spawning occurs between February and June. There are usually four or five spawning events a season. Then they will move on. Juveniles will join the first school they encounter after hatching.

Captive shoals will only breed if they are big enough to school. They are not particularly protective of their eggs and will allow trusted humans to enter the pond to harvest them. It is much easier to induce spawning via chemical injection. The eggs and sperm can then be collected and artificially mixed. This averts the largest problem with in-pond breeding: wishiwashi eat their own eggs. If they are held in an enclosed environment with their eggs then almost all of them will be eaten before they can hatch.

Relatives

There are two species of wishiwashi. The Alolan wishiwashi is the only subspecies or species that is not endangered or critically endangered.

The other S. milibus subspecies, S. milibus europa, was hunted to the brink of extinction in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The Kalosian and Galarian governments had long seen wishiwashi as a nuisance. They were not easy to fish for and they often attacked military and commercial vessels. The HMS Challenger's discovery of lanturn marked a turning point. Fishing boats soon began to use lanturn to disrupt schools of wishiwashi and capture the individuals. The fish quickly became a beloved food in the region and the number of fishing boats continually increased.

The Galarian government for its part assisted in the capture and breeding of lanturn to help make the waters safer for naval passage. Kalos began using bluewing noivern and imported marine noivern to disrupt schools and protect its vessels. Galar's bluewing noivern population had sharply declined. The wild area was founded in large part to facilitate the recovery of the noivern population to the point where they could be used for commercial fishing.

There used to be tens of millions of wishiwashi in the seas around Galar and Kalos. By 1950 there were only five known schools remaining. Conservationists lobbied for the creation of another protected area, this time to save wishiwashi rather than kill them. One of the world's first marine preserves was established around the Isle of Armor to protect two of the remaining wishiwashi schools. Another two were captured and moved to the preserve. The population has grown in recent decades, but water pollution and the limited size of the marine preserve have kept the subspecies from returning to its former glory. There are currently more captive wishiwashi in European aquariums, fish farms, and trainer's estates than wild ones in the seas of Europe.

The second wishiwashi species, S. volcanus, lives in three mid-sized lakes in Hoenn. These lakes are formed in the calderas of volcanoes. The species is much smaller than S. milibus and only live in shoals of about seven hundred individuals. The remoteness of their habitat and preserves designed to protect the area's hot springs kept the population stable for centuries. Recent events in Hoenn led to two of the three volcanoes erupting. The population in one lake was eradicated and the other lake's population is barely holding on. Ash falling in to the third lake has made it toxic to the point that very few eggs have successfully hatched. The remaining wishiwashi have been taken in to captive breeding programs until their natural habitat is once again safe.