Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  If it’s an especially good day of tide-pool watching, you might catch a glimpse of the ultimate tide-pool survivor: the intelligent, secretive, deadly, and adaptable octopus. In John Steinbeck’s famous Cannery Row (a novel that has been likened to a sociological study of a tide pool5), he describes the octopus thusly:Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab.

  Steinbeck’s portrayal may seem awash in literary anthropomorphism, but modern video equipment has implicated the octopus in a real murder mystery at least as dramatic. Caretakers at the Seattle Aquarium were alarmed to find several of their sharks dead or missing week after week. An aquarist then stayed up all night with a video camera to reveal the culprit—an octopus that had been transferred to the shark tank (for which the caretakers were somewhat concerned for its own safety) had been leaping out at night to wrestle and squeeze sharks to death with its eight powerful arms.6

  Octopuses learn not only how to survive, but thrive, in almost any environment. 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 advisor’s shipboard wedding just offshore from the Hopkins Marine Laboratory in Pacific Grove. An amusing video making the rounds on the Internet shows octopuses in Indonesia that have learned to forage the increased numbers of coconut shells discarded from tourist boats and pull together two halves to make a spherical suit of armor.7

  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 their 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. 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 the marine animals of the Pacific Coast said this of the octopus’s capacity to blend in and hide: “A little observation will convince one that in a given area probably half of the specimens escape notice despite the most careful searching—a highly desirable situation from the points of view of the conservationist . . . and the octopus.” He added, “The octopus has an ink sac, opening near the anus, from which it can discharge a dense, sepia-colored fluid, creating a ‘smoke screen’ that should be the envy of the navy.”8

  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: “Another big octopus. I’ve often wondered if octopi ever bite. Today I found out. Yes, they do, they certainly do.”9

  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.10

  But blending away like a wallflower at a dance, disappearing in a flash, and biting (usually) is no way 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. Its use of tools (the coconut shells) for future use 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 kill even 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.

  APPLYING BIOLOGICAL IDEAS TO SOCIETAL NEEDS

  If these characteristics of adaptability have served millions of organisms well for billions of years, they might be worth learning from, given that we’ve only inhabited this Earth for the tiniest fraction of that time. Yet throughout history the translation of biological ideas to societal affairs has been met with distrust or resistance. Ed Ricketts himself made several forays into this arena. In fact, Ricketts, with his boundless curiosity (not to mention a steady supply of Prohibition-skirting alcohol ostensibly used for pickling specimens, but occasionally redistilled for libations), attracted a remarkable group of early-twentieth-century writers, poets, philosophers, scientists, and musicians to his tiny Cannery Row laboratory, all interested in exploring the connections between the forces of nature and society. For John Steinbeck, who spent long hours in the tide pools of California and Mexico with his dear friend Ricketts, there was an inextricable link between the struggle for survival in the tide pool and the struggles of characters like Tom Joad and his family in The Grapes of Wrath, fleeing the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl and straight into a fierce social struggle in the agricultural fields of California. For the mythologist Joseph Campbell, an early collecting trip with Ricketts to the Pacific Northwest, which included encounters with native Canadians fighting to hold on to their traditions amid rapid societal change, inspired and guided his quest to find universal characteristics of creation and hero myths within human belief systems.11

  Ricketts’s own ideas connecting nature and society were both pragmatic and transcendental. He saw the immediate value of nature study to the emerging war effort. He noted wryly in his journals that the Japanese fishermen he had encountered on his collecting trips along the Pacific coast of North America in the late 1930s had perhaps been taking a few more depth soundings than were necessary for shrimp trawling.12 At the outset of World War II he offered to the U.S. Navy his understanding of the coral reef biology and oceanography of the Mandated Islands of the Pacific, which he felt would be invaluable for any marine invasion there. But the navy never responded, and he gradually accumulated evidence that the military wasn’t ready to us
e much natural history data in its war effort. He noted in his journals the vain efforts of a colleague to help the navy understand fouling on their ship hulls by barnacles (which drift in the water as microscopic plankton until they find a hard surface to settle upon and transform into the shelled adult forms that greatly reduce the speed and maneuverability of ships):At the start of the war, she heard the navy had a ship fouling project near Bremerton. Offered her services. Chiefly patriotic. But the navy was very polite and stiff-necked and stuffy. Pure scientists, biologists especially, no doubt had their uses, but the navy wanted practical people. Engineers certainly, but no theoreticians. Biologists, especially systematists, were ivory tower. A year later the navy’s long and costly experiments had been ruined. Curiously there was no difference between the expensively set-up experiments and the controls. In fact the navy had been so perfectionist and so practical that they had filtered every bit of water used in the experiment. At the same time filtering out the larvae that even the most abstruse biologist could have told them would have developed into the fouling organisms they wanted to deal with!13

  In this case, it was the navy’s search for perfection that did in its experiments—its engineers filtered out all the variation and messiness of life itself, and in the process lost track of exactly what they were looking for. While the example appears like a caricature of itself, it sadly reflects our continued search for perfect security solutions, rather than ones that solve the problems at hand.

  But Ricketts’s efforts to bring biological understanding to human conflict stretched far beyond nautical charts and bio-fouling. He struggled his whole life to outline a philosophy of “breaking through,” through which he sought to define the conditions under which people in conflict might transcend their differences and find a new, mutually beneficial state of understanding. Central to this philosophy was the idea that people could break through conflicts if they set aside their preconceived notions and biases about the other side and came to a dispute “honestly presenting the main theses, however controversial.”14 This followed directly from his study of tide-pool organisms, for he felt that the only real difference between the struggles of society and the struggles of tide-pool organisms was that the tide-pool creatures more straightforwardly revealed their intentions through their actions:Note the relations between individuals, families, friends, races, and nations, which involve expediences both political (power-driven), emotional and economic (hunger and poverty), with their ideologies, competitions, needs, overproductions, overpopulations and wars. Most of these have their primitive counter-parts along the shore. Who would see a replica of man’s social structure has only to examine the abundant and various life of the tidepools, where miniature communal societies wage dubious battle against equally potent societies in which the individual is paramount, with trends shifting, maturing, or dying out, with all the living organisms balanced against the limitations of the dead kingdom of rocks and currents and temperatures and dissolved gases. A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.15

  Ricketts himself was heavily influenced by his only academic mentor, the early ecologist Warder Allee, who Ricketts knew through his short and incomplete undergraduate training at the University of Chicago. Allee was particularly interested in the cooperative relationships between organisms, and he saw them as a model for human society. At the outbreak of World War II, Allee also wanted to contribute his biological knowledge to the security challenges of his day, lamenting, “The present system of international relations is biologically unsound.”16

  But if these efforts to connect biology and society were ignored as academic musings before and during the war, the postwar twentieth century saw them actively dismissed as unscientific or even dangerous. In part this was due to a perceived relationship between eugenic philosophy practiced by the Nazis and interpretations of Social Darwinism centered on the concept of “survival of the fittest” (to be clear, evolution is not about survival of the “fittest” at all, but about survival of the “just good enough” to reproduce). At the same time, the life sciences were going through an absolute revolution, brought about by the discovery of the structure of DNA. The old plodding way of studying biology by building intensive repeated observations of nature into grand sweeping syntheses was pushed into the back corners of academia, and even hugely accomplished biologists such as E. O. Wilson at Harvard found themselves marginalized by the giants of the new molecular biology.17 In response, the study of ecology sought to be more like its successful molecular cousin, looking for clean and absolute laws hidden in mathematical approximations of nature and designing small-scale experiments that provided clear and unequivocal evidence of some ecological phenomena, no matter how trivial. The notion of just going out and observing nature for its own sake was relegated to the dalliances of hobbyists. High schools, colleges, and even graduate programs stopped teaching basic zoology, botany, and taxonomy,18 and funding for long-term programs to simply monitor changes in species populations dried up.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the idiocy of turning our backs to nature became unequivocally clear. The erosion of natural history education occurred alongside an alarming trend toward children spending continually less time outdoors, which may relate to the higher incidences of childhood obesity, inability to focus, and mental health issues—a suite of problems Richard Louv has termed “Nature Deficit Disorder.”19 More broadly, the organisms studied by ecologists in tiny experimental treatments or in the laboratory were disappearing throughout their natural ranges, whole bodies of water were becoming “dead zones,” even the entire climate was being changed, and that in turn was completely reorganizing ecosystems.

  Because these complex issues inevitably involve human behavior—burning fossil fuels in our cars, letting excess fertilizer wash down the Mississippi, fishing a species until not enough are left to make fishing economically viable—the recursive path tracing the relationship between the activities of organisms in a tide pool or a savannah and the activities of humans in societies is more clear than ever before. Accordingly, the application of biological ideas and evolutionary theory to societal questions is once again becoming accepted by scientists20 and welcomed in society for the novel insights that often come with it. Paleobiologist Geerat Vermeij, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient who has been hugely influential on the work discussed in this book, has recently demonstrated that the economy of society and the economy of nature, including concepts of trade, competition, power, and collapse, are built on the same principles.21 Applying this analogy in the wake of the recent financial crisis, both the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England have consulted with biologists to glean ideas from biology, evolution, and ecology on how to manage the complex global “ecosystem” of finance.22 “Darwinian medicine,” which considers the evolutionary roots and causes of disease and shifts treatment strategies accordingly (for example, by recognizing the adaptive value of most fevers in fighting infection rather than seeking to suppress them with drugs), is slowly taking root.23 A whole field of “biomimicry” has emerged, which collectively looks at how computing, energy generation, architecture, industrial agriculture, and medicine, among other fields, can be dramatically improved by copying and adopting nature’s strategies in these areas.24

  The old traditional approaches of social-biological study—that of Allee and Ricketts and Steinbeck—in which careful observation of nature provides the essential building blocks of understanding larger, more holistic societal issues, are more valid and essential than ever. But the translation between natural systems and human society cannot be, and should not be, a perfect cloning. As a scientist who has worked in Congress, I have learned that legitimate ethical concerns, shady politics, and everything in between make the literal translation of many sc
ientific ideas into policy both impossible and, usually, inadvisable. Nonetheless, we have erred too far in the direction of ignoring biology altogether, leaving abundant room to incorporate biological wisdom into whatever logic currently drives our security analysis, planning, and practice.

  Making this science-to-society transition work will require a mutual learning process by anyone who wants to get past the “worded idealisms.” And, as I show in the next chapter, a learning process is really the start of an adaptable process. Learning is essentially a force of nature that makes adaptation possible. For organisms in nature or organizations in a bureaucracy, harnessing the power of learning from environmental changes is a key first step in becoming more adaptable to changes that will inevitably come in the future.

  chapter three

  LEARNING AS A FORCE OF NATURE

  LEARNING IS AT THE CORE of all security situations and responses. Nearly every security situation arises because of some past failure to learn by one of the parties involved, and nearly every security situation requires learning to respond to the situation and to prevent it from happening again. Learning about security in nature takes a wide range of forms. Learning can involve a single dramatic lesson that becomes entrenched for life, or it can be the outcome of an ongoing process of selection and adaptation.

  When my family and I moved to Tucson, Arizona, we took our dogs, who were inclined to chase anything that moves, to “rattlesnake aversion” training. They were brought right up to a live but defanged rattler, and when they got within striking distance, the trainer applied a mild—but surprising—electric shock. The dogs howled and leapt back in terror from the snake. Then they were shown another, larger snake in a cage and given a second shock. After that, just seeing a snake without any shock sent them jumping away or cowering behind my legs. The trainer, who gets a nifty $65 per dog for the five minutes the training takes, guarantees this associative learning will be with them for life.