You can injure yourself by getting bloodpacks and let it heal you for evolution progress. Its not hard but just takes a while, youre also working toward a bloodstalker while getting an evolved tidepup.

Rare flowers activate their debuff ability which also counts towards their evolution progress. You can alternate between standing on a campfire and eating rare flowers to evolve them. The wifi symbol on the right is the bebuff cool down and the numbers that show up at the bottom show you the health buffer threshold for the health regen ability. So if you set the threshold to 50 you'll need to take 50 damage to activate the ability. But you'll need to take the damage quickly to reach the threshold. The actual amount of health you have doesn't matter. Once the ability activates the numbers at the bottom will change colors and start to countdown before you can activate the ability again. The number of times you need to activate one of the abilities to get a growth surge seems to change as you progress

You can evolve these safely by putting the tidepup on your shoulder and accessing your own beehive a few times to get low health then sitting on a chair until you heal, then repeating.

For easier evolving: have damaged threshold set to 50. stand on lit campfire next to spikes to maximize damage to enable healing. During the 30 second healing cooldown, step off the fire and eat a rare mushroom to activate dispel.

To get it evolved you have to hurt yourself till it heals you. Best way to do that is to stand in the campfire

Its egg must be hatched underwater but the baby can live on land. Baby also only eats meat

30 second cool down after successful healing

I recently discovered that the Tidepup can deflect dilo venom projectiles...

I found the best way to evolve it is to make sure your HP is over 300. Set the threshold to 250. Use a tek rifle and point at the ground to hurt yourself with the splash damage until it triggers the healing. Then eat a rare flower/mushroom to activate the debuff remover. Repeat over and over until it evolves. Every 30 seconds hurt yourself with the tek rifle then eat rare flower/mushroom.

A good strategy is tame this, get bloodpacks and heal yourself really fast which gives this guy progress and gets you closer ti a bloodstalker.