Piranha Plant

Piranha Plants, known as Packun Flower (パックンフラワー) in Japan, are carnivorous plant enemies that appear throughout the Mario franchise. They are portrayed as a leafy, green stalk topped Venus Flytrap with a white-spotted red or green globe and sharp teeth reminiscent of piranhas. Despite being plants, Piranha Plants have been depicted as being sentient and capable of speech in a few appearances, though unlike several other enemies in the Mario series, they have never been shown forming societies. Piranha Plant characters such as Petey Piranha, Piranha Bean, and Dino Piranha, among others, reveal that some Piranha Plants can have animal-like bodies, making them capable of walking. Mom Piranha, Dino Piranha, and Peewee Piranha are all depicted hatching from eggs, suggesting that Piranha Plants may be oviparous. However, relatives of Piranha Plants, Nipper Plants, are implied to have a different reproduction method as they are shown to evolve from spores in the Yoshi's Island games.

Super Mario series
The first appearance of Piranha Plants was in World 1-2 of Super Mario Bros., where they were semi-common enemies, and have reappeared in nearly all subsequent games in the series. Another type of Piranha Plant that appears in Super Mario Bros. 3 is the Ptooie, a walking Piranha Plant that exhales air to lift a spiked ball into the air to hinder Mario's progress in the game. Piranha Plants usually come up from pipes, but sometimes they may also simply stick up from the ground and in rare cases even walk freely on its own roots. In New Super Mario Bros. U, Piranha Plant appears on a moving platform. In New Super Luigi U, the plant appears to be a giant piranha as an enemy of Luigi. In Super Mario World, there is a variant of Piranha Plant that jumps out of pipes before retreating into them again. Super Mario Sunshine introduces a large Piranha Plant character Petey Piranha and a Fire Plant on Mario Tennis Aces. In Super Mario Galaxy, two stronger versions of a Piranha Plant, Dino Piranha, and Fiery Dino Piranha, appear. Another Piranha Plant boss, Peewee Piranha, appears in Super Mario Galaxy 2. Some Piranha Plants spit fireballs and are known as Venus Fire Traps. Another variant, introduced in Super Mario 3D Land, are the Inky Piranha Plants, which spit out ink to obstruct the player's view and Super Mario 3D World. Piranha Plant appears again in Super Mario Odyssey, allowing Mario to "capture" the plant by throwing Cappy, his hat, at the plant's head.

Other appearances
Piranha Plants also appear in the Mario Kart series as hazards that the racers must deal with (and as a power-up in Mario Kart 8), and in various Mario Party minigames. Piranha also appears in Sonic Lost World as a DLC. Piranha plants appear in the television series. They have made cameos in Tetris Attack and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. Piranha Plant also later appeared in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake. Piranha Plant is also a playable fighter, via downloadable content, in the 2018 crossover fighting game Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which the inclusion of the character was released in January 2019 and made available for free to those who purchased and registered the game with a My Nintendo account before the end of that month. Around the same time, it also received its own amiibo figure from Nintendo.