everytime a the "are pikmin animals or plants?" question pops up, I always answered "fungi" as a joke. Little did I know

Pikmin 4 suggests glow Pikmin probably aren't actually Pikmin. The community's best guess is that they're actually Pikmin ghosts.

Whenever they said they were "Half animals half plants" or "Not quite animals, not quite plants" I always assumed fungi because that's kind of what fungi is honestly?

Apparently Purple Pikmin to produce "gravitational waves that can warp space-time" so now we need to find a type of fungus that can do that to make this accurate once more

8:53 Pikmin breathing from their leaves has some in-game basis: when hit by water attacks, the water gathers at their leaves to choke them, same with poison

I've always assumed, with how artificial the onion looks, that they are synthetic chimeras made by humans which escaped cultivation when we went extinct/left.

In the newer games, the Onion's "legs" are flexible and tentacley, and I always thought they looked more like mycelium hyphae than roots.

Actually, the eyeball isn't evidence of multicellularity. The warnowiids are a clade of single-celled organisms with camera-style eyes (referred to as ocelloids) that actually have the full structure of an eye like our own, with a cornea, lens, pupil, and retina. In fact, there are actually a lot of odd single-celled organisms with this level of specialised structures. So Pikmin having such specialised structures is not evidence of multicellularity.

My theory is that pikmin, onions, candypop buds, and maybe pellet posies are all one highly polymorphic eusocial species, with pikmin being a sort of larval state that can mature into a reproductive form (onions), a larval conversion form (candypop buds), and possibly a nutrient consolidation form (pellet posies). Classifying this species more specifically than being a eukaryote probably isn't possible, but I think it's an interesting idea, if nothing else.

(I'm also not convinced the glow is canon rather than being purely for gameplay purposes in highlighting inactive pikmin, but that's a relatively minor point)

7:22 "the union is capable of a small range of motion" literally lights on fire and blast off into outer orbit

1:32 I used to use King Phillip. But someone came up with the sillier "Dumb Kids Playing Catch On Freeways Get Squished" and always think of that now.

Considering the reproduce by taking corpses back to the onion I always understood them as a parasitic fungus with a level of sentience.

Also! If we assume the onion is the adult pikmin, is it also possible its the 'queen' pikmin. Like a queen ant or queen bee whose developed purely to be a pikmin factory for the hive. Pikmin do have a lot of similarities to eusocial insects likes ants and bees.

13:24 I believe a red Pikmins nose is supposed to be more like a spear, which they thrust into enemies, hence the extra attack power they have

21:39 I                control the speed at which lobsters die (of hypothermia)

The Pikmin 4 Piklopedia specifically states that Pikmin are a type of plant than has evolved to mimic animals. The stem with the leaf or flower on their head is the shoot, while the body itself is a highly specialized bulb

This is FASCINATING! My previous favorite interpretation of Pikmin was by Tumlr artist the-knife-consumer, where they were basically a symbiotic (ish) combo of an animal with a plant taking root in their brains. (For those curious, red Pikmin worked via a waxy secretion, but I strongly reccomend checking out their own stuff instead of just reading of it in a YT comment). However, it has now been dethroned by this delightfully thorough fungus interpretation. My only potential issue is the fact that onions fly, but that can be explained by their round shape: They can store some nutrients to sustain short periods of autonomous flight, and the markings on the ground we see in-game are structures made by the mycelium growth to mark viable spots to, so to speak, "plug in". Itd be a nice way for separate mycelium networks to exchange genetic information in order to keep the genepool varied.

pikmin are friends :)

Olimar would have a field day with this video lol and likely be incredibly excited! I could see him being fascinated with your research.

kind of funny how much pikmin turns into a horror game when you look deeper into things

When we were younger, my sister and I would call the Sensitive Plant the Touch-Me-Not Plant since it reacts so negatively to touch.