Yesterday Clamperl was released into the game. As part of a limited Research event taking place during the usual Community Day hours. With this release the Pokémon Gorebyss and Huntail have also been added into the game, as they are two possible evolutions of Clamperl.
Back in the other Pokémon games you need to give Clamperl the held item Deep Sea Scale and trade it for it to evolve into Gorebyss and give it a Deep Sea Tooth to hold while trading to have it evolve into Huntail. Due to this I was wondering how they would make these evolutions available in Pokémon GO. Since they are the only Pokémon evolving with those items it would seem like they wouldn't add the items. Sinnoh Stone wouldn't be an option either as they are from the Hoenn Region and not from Sinnoh.
Turns out that, just like Wurmple, the evolution of Clamperl is random once you click on the evolve button. Which requires 50 Clamperl Candy. It's rather disappointing that it has to happen random. For Wurmple it's understandable as it depends on its random personality value in the other games. So with the choice of evolving your Clamperl in the other games it would've made sense if they did add a choice for which one to evolve it into. Unfortunately they decided to just make it entirely random.
I didn't have time to do the whole 3 hours. I only had less than 2 hours to walk around and spin Pokéstops to get quests for Clamperl. Before I ran into my first Pokéstop to get a quest I came across a wild Masquerain. Thanks to the increased spawn of Water-type Pokémon. I didn't have it in my Pokédex yet, as I never evolved a Surskit yet as I didn't have a really high IV one yet. When the event was over I also ran into a random Purugly on my way home, which was also a new Pokédex entry. I caught a wild Glameow a few days ago, and now I already have both Glameow and Purugly in the Pokédex!
Once I reached my first two Pokéstops it was really easy to complete the Quests to get Clamperl. As I had to make 2 Great Throws in a row and 3 Nice Throws in a row. By the time I reached the next Pokéstop I already completed these. The first Clamperl I caught was also the one with the highest CP that I got from all the quests. At first I didn't know that Clamperl could also be Shiny until I saw some messages about it our group chat for Raids and other Pokémon GO stuff. With about half an hour left for the event one of the quests I turned in awarded me with a Shiny Clamperl!
After I caught the Shiny Clamperl I was almost done with the Pokéstops in that area. I also decided to take over the Gasthuismuseum Gym there. I was quite close to getting the golden Gym Badge there. And I had a quest to use a super effective charged attack in a Gym battle. After the first round I completed the quest and got a new one from a Pokéstop there. Which wanted me to win a Gym battle! That came in convenient to get it right then when I still had a 2nd round of battling to go in the Gym! I took the Gym over and when I gave 10 berries to my Rhyperior I got awarded with the golden Gym Badge!
Then I collected the other quests around there and tried to finish them. After that I started moving back to the city center to get some of the Pokéstops that I didn't go to there yet as they weren't on the route I took. I ran into a cousin and talked for a little while. A bit later I ran into someone I sometimes see at Raids and he had just started playing for the day. So I walked around for a few more minutes with him until the event was done.
These are all the 19 Clamperl that I managed to catch from my quests. I had a problem with one quest where I tried to claim the reward and got a network error. That Clamperl is now somewhere in the queue of several Pokémon from quests that I still have to capture. So it will take a while before I can see it and catch it xD
Did you get several Clamperl from this event?