Pokemon who eat other Pokemon: The diffuse coevolution of Durant and Heatmor

Anteaters eat ants. Therefore, Heatmor, the anteater Pokemon eats Durant, the ant Pokemon. Simple enough logic, right?

As always with Transforme-, er, Pokemon, there’s more than meets the eye.

Durant, you see, is no normal-type ant. It’s a metal ant: a Bug/Steel type combination to be exact. While the Bug/Steel type offers Durant plenty of advantages, like being a Steel type that isn’t weak to Fighting or Ground, the problem lies in Durant’s 4x weakness to Fire – which is exactly the type of Pokemon Heatmor happens to be. So what’s with the following PokeDex entry from Pokemon Black and White?

> They attack in groups, covering themselves in steel armor to protect themselves from Heatmor.

Durant covering itself in steel armor to protect itself from Heatmor is an example of diffuse coevolution. Diffuse coevolution is defined as when two or more species reciprocally affect each other’s evolution through the process of natural selection.

So why is it that the most advantageous course of natural selection for Durant was to protect itself with steel armor that their natural predator, Heatmor, can melt through with a quadruply-effective flame-spitting snout? That doesn’t seem to make sense.

Sometimes in the Pokemon universe, in-game type effectiveness can be at odds with lore axioms, like Ash’s Pikachu being able to thunderbolt Brock’s Onix for example – but that’s not the case with Durant and Heatmor either. Canonically, Durant’s steel covering doesn’t seem to phase Heatmor in the least either, as Heatmor’s Pokemon White PokeDex entry explicitly states:

> Using their very hot, flame-covered tongues, they burn through Durant’s steel bodies and consume their insides.

So why would Durant serve itself up to Heatmor with the body armor equivalent of a built-in barbeque grill?

Because it probably wasn’t always that way. At one point in Durant and Heatmor’s history, Durant wasn’t Steel-type and Heatmor wasn’t Fire-type – or at least, Heatmor’s Fire-type wasn’t as overt. It’s more likely that Durant donned the Steel-type armor as an evolutionary response to Heatmor’s progenitor (who was probably a Normal-type); although this armor was effective for a time, Heatmor eventually developed a set of flame glands (in another example of diffuse coevolution) to get past Durant’s formidable exoskeleton and turn it into a flambeed formicidae.

Despite all this, Durant isn’t as helpless as it might seem in-game towards Heatmor. According to its Pokemon Sword PokeDex entry, “When attacked by Heatmor, they retaliate using their massive mandibles,” which suggests that its mandibles, steel or not, are an effective countermeasure, particularly if several Durant are working together to repel an invading Heatmor.

Durant also “attacks in groups” and more specifically, as per its Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 entries, “Individuals each play different roles in driving Heatmor, their natural predator, away from their colony.”

This suggests that there’s a Durant hierarchy that we have yet to fully witness. Is the Durant which we’re familiar with now simply a worker ant that helps to “build complicated, interconnected tunnels into mazes,” with regards to their nests (per its Pokemon White PokeDex entry)? Do we have yet to see a stronger, more specialized soldier Durant that can better combat Heatmor? Or perhaps in the future we’ll see Durant evolve into a Queen Ant with a Rock/Bug type combination to better offset its weakness to Heatmor? Whatever the case, unless Game Freak decides to give Durant the Heatproof ability in the future instead of Truant, it’s not the best idea to send a Durant out against Heatmor when it comes to in-game battling.

Heatmor stalking some fleeing Durant/deviantart.com/peaceelectronics

One last note of interest: Durant has another natural predator, Sandaconda. According to Durant’s Pokemon Shield PokeDex entry, “ They work together to protect their eggs from Sandaconda.”

Sandaconda is, as its name implies, a desert-dwelling snake that can spray sand from its nostrils at a high rate of speed. Ironically, Sandaconda is a Ground-type Pokemon; if Durant was indeed only a Bug-type Pokemon before it attached its steel-plated armor, it would have been resistant to Sandaconda’s Ground-type attacks. Because it’s a Bug/Steel dual-type as a result of evolutionary tactics against Heatmor however, it only sports normal resistance to Sandaconda’s Ground-type attacks. That being said, we like Durant’s chances against Sandaconda in-game than we do its chances against Heatmor.

Durant and Heatmor is one of the most fascinating examples of a predator-prey relationship in Pokemon not only because of the fact that Durant fights back against Heatmor with its rock-crushing mandibles but because the diffuse coevolution evinced by both Pokemon (Durant securing itself with Steel-type armor and Heatmor gaining flame glands as a result) portends that in the future we might see more instances of diffuse coevolution between the two — maybe in regional variant form? Here’s hoping that Game Freak revisits the Durant/Heatmor predator-prey relationship in the future and add another level of adaptation and counteradaptation to their intriguing rivalry.

What do you think of the diffuse coevolution of Durant and Heatmor? Can you think of any more examples of diffuse coevolution in Pokemon that you find equally as intriguing as that of Durant and Heatmor’s? Let us know in the comments.

Check out more installments of Pokemon who eat other Pokemon: Metagross, the terrifying, steel-limbed, hunter-killer.