Planet of the Supreme Predatory octopus
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If you want to learn about security and adaptability from nature, I can think of no better place to start than to stare into the eye of an octopus. Even in the barren, isolated tanks of a marine biology lab, colleagues have discovered octopuses escaping from their chambers and braving the dry air to scamper across a lab bench and find a snack in a nearby tank before returning to their own.
But this portrayal reveals only part of the octopus's success. With its soft meaty body, the octopus is an attractive target for predators. So it constructs a protective den in the rocks, sometimes with a peephole for its keen eyes to peer out from. If good rocky crevices aren't available, it will learn to use whatever is around it — a shell, an old crate, or the champagne bottle tossed decades ago from my adviser's shipboard wedding just offshore from the Hopkins Marine Laboratory in Pacific Grove, Calif.
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When the octopus does venture out from its constructed bunker, millions of cells on the surface of its skin are all sensing and responding to the world around, instantly changing shape and color to perfectly match its immediate surroundings. Once, after staring at a tide pool in Baja California for a long time, I thought I spied an octopus, but the small waves cresting the tide pool walls riffled the surface too much to be sure. My eyes failing me, I reached my hand in to engage my tactile senses, and instantly a dark cloud of smoky ink filled the pool. By the time it cleared, I had confirmed my identification, but the beast was long gone.
John Steinbeck's good friend the marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts who is fictionally portrayed as the character Doc in Cannery Row and other Steinbeck novels , in his guide to marine animals of the Pacific Coast, said this of the octopus's capacity to blend in and hide: And if those defenses don't work, the octopus has a powerful jaw and a mean bite, as the ever-curious Ricketts related in his field notes from a collecting trip in Canada: I've often wondered if octopi ever bite.
Today I found out. Yes, they do, they certainly do. The blue-ringed octopus takes this biting to extremes. When threatened, it flashes dozens of brilliant blue rings across its body, a warning to predators that it is armed — in this case with highly toxic bacteria, powerful enough to kill a human, that live symbiotically in the octopus's salivary glands.
But blending into the background, disappearing in a flash, and biting usually are not ways to find a mate, and mating is as essential to survival as avoiding predators. For that, an opposite tack is needed — one that sets an individual apart from all others. Some octopuses, when spying a potential reproductive partner, will split their missions — the half of their body facing the mate will pulse with a psychedelic display of color, but the half facing the rest of the world including other competing male octopuses is dull and inconspicuous, as if to say, "nothing special going on here.
Taken together, the octopus reveals almost all of the characteristics you would want in a biologically inspired adaptable security system.
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- Wolfstrap.
- Planet of the Supreme Predatory Octopus - Daniel H. Rosenthal - Google Книги.
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Its use of tools the coconut shells and its well-known ability to wreak havoc on laboratory containment systems show that it can learn from a changing environment. The rapidly changing skin cells show it has an adaptable organization in which a lot of power to detect and directly respond to changes in the environment is given to multiple agents that don't have to do a lot of reporting and order-taking from a central brain. That it has an ink cloud and camouflage and a powerful bite that it uses both for offense and defense reveals its redundant and multi-functioning security measures.
Its ability to deliberately stalk, surprise, and even kill prey much larger than itself shows that it can manipulate uncertainty for its own ends. Finally, its use of deadly bacteria in its own defense reveals that it uses symbiotic relationships to extend its own adaptive capabilities. Not all organisms in nature display these characteristics so prominently as the octopus, but all organisms use them to varying extents to survive and adapt.
Adaptation arises from leaving or being forced from one's comfort zone.
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Accordingly, it's understandable that we might be a little resistant to dive into this strange world where reacting to the previous crisis is no longer good enough and making vague predictions of the future no longer counts as "doing something. But one of the results of using nature — with its relentless ability to solve problems and neutralize unpredictable threats — as a template for adaptability is that it weakens almost every excuse we have for not becoming more adaptable. The overwhelming success of adaptation in nature practically shames us into at least trying.
And everything that seems like a barrier to change has already been crossed in nature.
In some densely populated areas like the British Isles , all the large native predators like the wolf, bear, wolverine and lynx have become locally extinct , allowing herbivores such as deer to multiply unchecked except by hunting. Like every single one of the countless organisms it shares a planet with, the fish just has to be good enough to survive and reproduce itself. Or, get it for Kobo Super Points! Proceedings of the Royal Society B: For other uses, see Apex predator disambiguation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The reviewer at the site also seemed a little confused by the work.
We complain that our bureaucracies are too institutionalized to change, but even organisms whose outer appearance has remained steadfastly unchanged for millions of years can be highly adaptable by farming out that adaptable capacity to semi-independent parts, like immune cells and skin color pigment cells.
We argue that there are people we just can't work with or who will never come to peace with one another, but in nature the meekest organisms form beneficial symbiotic relationships with the most terrifying. Why is Snot Green? The Wave Watcher's Companion.
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