Bill, my vaporeon just had its litter, 5 healthy little eevee babies. The only problem is, one of the babies is shiny and the mother is rejecting it! What do I do to ensure my silver baby stays healthy and alive?

As a warning, Bill, “donate it to me” is not an appropriate answer.—LH

You wound me, Lanette. You wound me. —Bill

Unfortunately, this means you’ll need to care for the puppy yourself. It’s very rare (and difficult) to get the mother to adopt her pup after she’s rejected it, and in some cases, she may even attack the puppy if you try to reintroduce it.

That having been said, there are three things you need to monitor for immediately after birth if you haven’t figure it out already: hypothermia, low blood sugar, and dehydration. If your puppy is shivering, that’s a good thing. If it isn’t and if its nose is losing color, that would be hypothermia. If your puppy’s nose and gums are wet, then it’s fine, but if you feel a sticky, mucous membrane in its mouth, then dehydration is setting in. Finally, if your puppy is more lethargic than usual or if it’s convulsing, then its blood sugar is dangerously low. The latter two conditions warrant a trip to your local pokémon center, but it’s important to know that there are ways to prevent your eevee from getting to this state.

First, heat. It’s important to stabilize your eevee’s body temperature within the first week. Use heat lamps and hot water bottles to keep your eevee warm; blankets shouldn’t be used in addition to this, as it’s very easy to induce heat stress in your puppy (which is just as bad as hypothermia … just less difficult to achieve). Try to keep your eevee’s environment at around 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) on the first two days, then drop the temperature down by a degree each day after that until your eevee can survive on its own body heat.

Feeding, meanwhile, is a bit more difficult to resolve, but it’s vital for not only the other two issues I’ve mentioned above but also the development of your eevee’s immune system. If you have another female mammalian pokémon that’s of breeding age, try to get it to nurse from her. If not, try to find a breeder or a friend with one such pokémon and ask them for milk, or purchase raw miltank milk or specially crafted eevee formula. The latter may be the easiest option, actually, as it’s readily available at all pokémarts and contains all the vitamins, minerals, and sugars a growing eevee needs. It just doesn’t quite provide the biological component that helps with a young eevee’s immune system, so some trainers prefer the more organic method if they can find it.

All young eevee need to be fed about once every two to three hours. (If it’s healthy, it will cry to let you know when it’s time.) If not feeding from another pokémon, you’ll need to give it its milk or formula from a bottle. Be sure to sterilize the bottle before loading by boiling it for five to ten minutes in water. Dry thoroughly, then fill it. Finally, warm the bottle gently until it reaches a temperature of 95 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (35 to 37.8 degrees Celsius)—or human body temperature, in other words. If a drop of it applied to the back of your wrist is too hot for you, then it’s too hot for your eevee.

Once your eevee reaches about two to three weeks, you can begin to wean it. Feed it milk in a flat dish to teach it how to eat from a bowl for the first two weeks, then give it specially made eevee puppy kibble (available at any pokémart) in addition to the milk for the next two. Decrease the amount of milk you give it each day after you begin feeding it solid foods. After a month, you can switch completely to the kibble and water. (Do not feed it anything but kibble until about two months.)

Finally, one last thing not that many people think of: getting it to relieve itself. Eevee don’t really know this at birth; rather, their mothers lick their stomachs to get them to go. You can simulate this behavior by rubbing your eevee’s stomach after feeding. Do this for two to three weeks after birth (or, in other words, as you feed it milk or formula), or it simply won’t relieve itself.

Make it past a couple of months, and your eevee should be able to survive on its own, just like any other eevee. But it’s important to remember that until then, it’s a good idea to avoid reintroducing this one to its mother. You may be able to expose it to its brothers and sisters, but the mother may attack your shiny eevee on sight. It’s a leftover instinct from the wild—behavior designed to discourage a shiny from coming back and putting the rest of the litter in danger by drawing in a predator, basically. After the eevee can survive on its own and begins mastering its attacks, the mother may take an ambivalent stance towards her puppy, but it’s unlikely that she’ll ever see it as hers. It’s up to you to give that hatchling the love and affection it needs to grow.

Best of luck, anonymous.

Do shiny pokemon know that they’re special? My shiny mawile has a bit of an attitude compared to her teammates, and I’m wondering if it’s just her personality, or if it has anything to do with her coloration. Is it bad to treat her differently?

It actually depends on a number of factors, anonymous, including whether the pokémon is wild or domesticated and what species it is. Many pokémon are actually colorblind, and while some researchers claim that alternately colored pokémon also put out slightly different scents than their average-colored kin, there really isn’t enough evidence to substantiate that claim. For this reason, by and large, the pokémon themselves might not notice a difference.

However, coloration does play into the predator-prey dynamic. A differently-colored prey pokémon such as rattata, for example, are far easier to spot in the shadows of their native forests than the average-colored deep purple rattata. For that reason, they’re far easier for avian predators to spot and hunt down (as birds are not colorblind), which means other rattata may give them a wide berth. Conversely, stantler, which are normally brown to allow them to blend in with their environment, are also larger and stronger than rattata. Thus, stantler herds will typically rally around alternately colored individuals (which are normally bright gold or green) to protect them from larger predators that can see color (such as ursaring).

A similar phenomenon occurs with predatory pokémon, actually. Smaller or more solitary hunters such as sneasel normally rely on their coloration to help them blend in with their surroundings and avoid being detected by their quarry (or, in sneasel’s case, the avian parents of the eggs they’re trying to obtain). However, shiny sneasel are brightly colored due to errors in melanin production, and as a result, they’re far less successful hunters. If a shiny sneasel is lucky, it can coerce other sneasel to do its hunting for it, but by and large, other sneasel will force it to fend for itself. On the other hand, mightyena, which are pack pokémon, will always make sure every member of their pack is strong enough to hunt, which means the chestnut-colored mightyena will always have something to eat, regardless of whether or not its coloration makes it easier for avian and large-game quarry to spot. The sheer numbers of the pack will guarantee that the hunt is successful.

Then, of course, you have pokémon whose alternate colorations are so close to their normal colorations that even if the specimen could see color, it wouldn’t matter. For example, no wild pikachu can tell the difference between themselves and any pikachu with a slightly different color. Thus, the shiny pikachu is treated just about the same as an average pikachu within the same colony.

On the other hand, among wild pokémon with slightly more advanced cultures, alternate coloration can be considered a status symbol. For example, jynx seem to believe that shiny members of their species are destined to be elders, and thus, if a pink jynx exists in a jynx tribe, she’ll be the one to care for smoochum exclusively (an honor given only to elder jynx due to smoochum’s extreme value to the exclusively female jynx tribe). Likewise, pale fur and pink ears are signs of status among clefairy, to the point where they regard any cleffa born with such traits as being destined to become a colony leader—or clefairy king or queen, depending on the gender. Thus, if a shiny cleffa is born in a clefairy colony, the entire colony will eventually take orders from it once it evolves. It will also be the first to be offered a moon stone during a clefairy evolution ceremony. (Granted, it’s normally difficult to tell which individual in a colony is the clefairy king or queen until they direct their colony to attack you en masse, but that’s a different story.)

With that all said, domesticated pokémon tend to be different. This is largely due to human influence, actually. Because humans value shiny pokémon over average-colored ones, it’s easy to get carried away and dote on a shiny more than the rest of one’s team. That, in turn, may cause the shiny to become pampered, which indeed affects a pokémon’s attitude towards its teammates. It’s important from the outset to instill a sense of equality among your team, especially if you only have one or two shinies in a full team of six. In other words, the earlier you begin treating your shiny pokémon just as you would any other, the easier it will be to integrate that pokémon into your team.

Of course, there’s also nothing wrong with grooming a pokémon for a specific purpose (such as pokémon shows, where color variations are a key factor), but it’s also important to make the rest of your team feel valued at the same time.

Regarding your mawile, her attitude could be due to any number of reasons. It could very well be her natural personality, or—if this is a sudden change or if she’s a new addition to your team—it could have something to do with the way she had been treated earlier. Alternatively, it could even be part of a mawile’s natural mischievousness. It’s difficult to say right off the bat, but I can tell you that if she has always been like that and if she is not a new addition, then it’s unlikely that it has anything to do with her coloration.

What causes pokemon to be “shiny” and why is it so rare?

Genetic mutations, more or less. You see, anonymous, very occasionally, the process of combining genetics during breeding doesn’t quite work out as intended. Recessive genes here or there get triggered, resulting in the abnormal production of one pigment or another, thus producing an alternate colorization you know as “shiny.” It’s very similar, in fact, to albinism or the purple kecleon phenomenon.

The reason why it’s so rare, meanwhile, is in part because it’s all determined by recessive genes. In order to produce a shiny, you must first have two parents who have the “shiny” gene, and even then, the shiny egg requires a very precise combination of their genes. Otherwise, without that perfect combination, the dominant genes for colorization will be expressed instead, resulting in a rather normal-looking pokémon. This is, of course, oversimplifying genetics, but that’s the basic gist of it.

Besides the fact that shininess is determined by an extremely precise combination of genes, it’s also not an ideal state for a pokémon to be in. With some species, an unusually colored pelt may render a specimen incapable of camouflaging properly, which could either put the entire colony in danger by calling a predator’s attention or make hunting difficult by making the predator easier to spot. In other species, the alternate colorization may be linked to other defects, such as blindness or photosensitivity (or, in the case of plant-like pokémon, an inability to photosynthesize), all of which make life difficult for the individual, rather than the colony as a whole. In either case, some species, particularly those that form small colonies in extreme environments, may take to culling oddly colored hatchlings due to any of these reasons, which increases their rarity.

In other words, shininess is really only a trait valued among domestic pokémon. The reason why it’s so rare is because of the difficulty in breeding such a specimen and the unlikelihood of its survival in the wild.