Yeah... the guilds in general should be rather accepting of new recruits. Heck, if anything, they should know that Vespiquen is at least a half-decent pokemon, so strength shouldn't be an issue anyways.
...
that, and they accepted a magikarp right off the bat, so yeah...

One last thing, though, um, there should only be ONE knocked out shellos. [sarcasm]Thank you Game Freak for making sure that pokemon species names didn't have plurals, leading to situations like this[/sarcasm]