After disaster strikes, we tend to sift through the run-up and fixate on all of the ways we messed up. But one leading marine biologist says we’re the only living things to react that way.
In his new book “What We Can Learn from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease” marine ecologist Rafe Sagarin of the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment uses the octopus as prime example of an organism that is able to adapt to its environment and respond to danger without the communication breakdowns that often befall human beings.
When an octopus camouflages into its environment for self-defense, each of its cells changes color individually. Photo by Ryan Wick via Flickr.
When an octopus camouflages into its environment for self-defense, each of its cells changes color individually. Photo by Ryan Wick via Flickr.
The octopus is notorious for changing colors to blend in with its environment. But, Sagarin says, it doesn’t do this by crawling through a reef and ordering, “Leg one, green. Leg three, red. Leg six, purple.” Instead, each individual cell responds to match its immediate surroundings.
“What can we learn from how nature deals with security threats that we can apply to society?” Sagarin asked in a presentation last week at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, which promotes cooperation between scientists and the public.
Sagarin breaks it down into a few direct lessons from our fellow creatures:
• A fish does everything it can to avoid being eaten by a shark, but it doesn’t try to turn the shark into a vegetarian. We should accept that some enemies cannot be convinced to change their positions.
• Beetles have evolved so that all of their appendages are able to do a variety of tasks. We need “creative redundancy” so that no matter the challenge, we’ll have multiple ways to solve it.
• Organisms, even those that are sometimes natural enemies, enter into symbiotic relationships in order to solve common problems.
Though Sagarin has spent most of his career wading through tide pools in Northern California, he started thinking about how his expertise in marine life might apply to the federal government during a stint in Washington shortly after 9/11.
As a Congressional Science Fellow to then-Rep. Hilda Solis, now the labor secretary, Sagarin watched Jersey barriers pop up around federal buildings and metal detectors darken their doorways.
He also noticed that as metal detectors went up in House and Senate office buildings, staffers quickly realized that “if you put your hand in your pocket over your keys, you didn’t have to take them out and put them on the X-ray belt,” saving them a few seconds in line. He said terrorists, with a much stronger motive to avoid detection, likely would come to the same conclusion just as quickly.
“Nature faces the same problem that we do in society, which is that risk is ubiquitous and almost entirely unpredictable,” Sagarin said. “We tend to look at risk as something we can eliminate if we just work hard enough at it.”
But other living things, Sagarin argues, operate under a different assumption: that risk is an inevitable part of life and the only way to survive is to react to each challenge as it presents itself.
Dr. Rafe Sagarin, Terence Taylor and USAID's Dr. Alex Deghan discuss lessons from "Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist ATtacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease."
“Natural organisms don’t plan, they don’t predict and they don’t try to perfect themselves,” Sagarin said. “They adapt to solve problems in the environment.”
Humans, meanwhile, “tend to create systems like the Department of Homeland Security – top-down organizations where communication is difficult because it has to go all the way up and down this chain,” Sagarin said.
And, as Sagarin points out, disasters like Hurricane Katrina prove that creating a large and complicated structure isn’t always the best way to react to a security threat. Sagarin uses “adaptability” to describe his ideas for best practices; other security experts look to “resilience” as a model.
“The resilience model is about looking not just at vulnerabilities but also at assets,” Dr. Anita Chandra, a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, one of the oldest and largest research organizations in the country.
RAND has been looking into past examples of communities in which governmental and nongovernmental organizations were able to work together to form a stronger response to crises.
“It’s this issue of how communities and structures have to change, how they function to adapt, and not simply overlay new structures, which is what we’ve done in emergency preparedness for a while.”
Chandra uses Hurricane Katrina as an example as well, pointing out that recovery efforts happened much more swiftly in some affected parts of Mississippi than in other Gulf Coast areas. In these communities, people were already engaged with the major local players, so they didn’t have to wait for the federal government to roll in and begin relief efforts.
“People had been working together before on other types of activities, maybe not emergency, but there were processes in place to really engage both community-based organizations and businesses with government, so there was a quicker response,” Chandra said.
The challenge for the government, then, is incorporating this kind of interdisciplinary research into existing frameworks.
While the octopus moving through a coral reef, each individual cell adapting to look like this rock or this plant, camouflaging itself for better protection, may be a beautiful metaphor, crafting national security policy is more complicated.
“The Department of Homeland Security recognizes that today’s threats are not the same as they were 10 years ago,” said spokeswoman Nicole Stickel. “Through research and collaboration with the public and private sectors, DHS invests in technological research and advancements to increase America’s resiliency.”
Stickel was not familiar with Sagarin’s research, but pointed to a few recent DHS innovations based on ideas from nature. They include explosive-detection technology based on the science behind a dog’s sense of smell and an X-ray imaging device inspired by the lobster’s 180-degree field of vision.
Terence Taylor, one of Sagarin’s collaborators on the book and co-author of Sagarin’s previous book, “Natural Security,” noted the challenges that face government leaders in presenting and addressing the reality of risk.
“Politicians and even business leaders and so on have a real challenge because they have to stand up and say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, we can’t eliminate this risk.’ And if you’re talking to the public about infectious disease, for example, this is a real policy challenge,” said Taylor, a former career British army officer who served in the United Nations as chief inspector for Iraq on weapons of mass destruction.
Sagarin’s ideas may not directly translate into a disaster preparedness plan, but he says they’re meant more as a metaphor to get the government to dial back its centralized efforts and start engaging citizens to respond to crises on an individual or community level.
“We’re unlike all other organisms,” he says. “But we’re not that unlike them.”