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When Catastrophe Strikes, Emulate the Octopus


The octopus does more than change color.
Photo illustration: Bartholomew Cooke

Unexpected events—natural disasters, terrorist attacks, pandemics—make us frantic. In the aftermath, we obsess about learning from our mistakes and pour resources into predicting what might happen tomorrow. We turn to experts, asking them how we might do things differently next time. The problem is that the experts were part of the system that failed in the first place, and their recommendations almost always get filtered through large, top-down bureaucracies that are poorly suited to deal with radical change. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, a government committee identified more than 100 failings but completely ignored the one unqualified success—the Coast Guard’s efforts to contain a 7.4 million-gallon oil spill. The lessons from that containment, it turns out, are the very things that would have been useful in dealing with the next big unexpected Gulf disaster, the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

Large, unexpected events are sometimes called black swans. And truly the best way to deal with black swans is to behave like another animal: the octopus. Watch one of these creatures glide over a coral reef and you’ll see it change color to blend in with its environment. As the octopus shifts hue, its brain is not frantically shouting orders—”Arm one, turn purple! Arm two, turn green!” Rather, countless individual skin cells are independently changing their color and form to match their immediate surroundings, so that as a whole the cephalopod looks just like the world around it.

The octopus and the millions of other life-forms it shares the planet with have had 3.5 billion years of experience adapting to unpredictable, risk-filled environments. By observing the natural world, we can identify the critical components of adaptability. Then we can start to understand them and build them into any system that deals with unknown threats.

The first lesson, of course, is to rely on distributed decision making rather than top-down fiat. Human organizations that decentralize decision making have already shown the power of this shift. Think SpaceX versus NASA, Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica, Darpa Grand Challenges versus DOD contracts. But the natural world has a lot more to teach us. The octopus doesn’t just change color—it has many more adaptation tricks up its eight sleeves. It can jet away fast in a cloud of ink, squeeze its huge body through the neck of a discarded beer bottle for an instant shelter, or use its powerful arms to create a suit of armor out of two coconut halves. This ability to both observe problems and then respond to them with multiple solutions is a hallmark of the most adaptable organisms on earth. The trick is not in knowing the single solution. It’s having lots of different options and solutions to turn to.

Some life-forms engage in symbiotic partnerships with other organisms. An octopus may provide shelter for toxic bacteria, which then give the octopus yet another tool in its arsenal—the ability, found in certain species, to inflict a deadly bite.

This skill, too, can translate to the man-made world. Symbiosis is at the heart of a remarkable partnership between Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian health practitioners who are sharing technology, databases, medicines, and knowledge to identify and reduce the threat of infectious diseases regardless of where they appear. These symbioses work not because they are perfect, all-encompassing solutions but because they solve immediate problems. The doctors in this coalition didn’t set out to create peace in the Middle East, but if peace does break out there, it will undoubtedly owe some credit to symbiotic relationships like this one. Indeed, many of today’s symbiotic relationships in nature emerged out of previously hostile interactions. Moreover, when something works in nature, natural selection helps that strategy proliferate. Indeed, the facilitators of this Middle Eastern infectious-disease consortium have replicated their success in the mutually hostile southeast Asian countries bordering the Mekong River and are now bringing the model to southern Africa.

Nature teaches us that adaptation to environmental risk carries no goal of perfection. In human society, it’s politically expedient to propose top- down security initiatives that promise total risk elimination, such as “winning the global war on terror.” But trying to eliminate a threat like terrorism is like trying to eliminate predation, and trying to minimize it with a single, centralized plan is the direct opposite of adaptability. Well-adapted organisms do not try to eliminate risk—they learn to live with it.

Rafe Sagarin ( is a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment. His book Learning From the Octopus is due out in April.