My Octopus Teacher/Encoding Information in DNA
Watch this documentary! It was terrific. Here’s what I found most fascinating, and some of the implications:
Octopi are incredible at disguising themselves and impersonating their environments. I loved the clips in the documentary showing the octopus impersonating a sheet of kelp, floating through the sea, or a rock, slowly drifting across the seafloor. It uses both its physical shape, contorting itself to look like fish or other parts of its environment, and also its color-changing chromatophores, allowing it to have the same texture and color of whatever it’s trying to impersonate. I can’t stress enough how impressive it is! Go watch the documentary!
Here’s what I find so cool about this: Octopi have a very short lifespan, only about 1 year. And they never meet their parents, they live almost their whole lives alone. That means this incredible repertoire of tricks is not taught to them by any other octopi. That leaves two options:
They learn it on their own
These specific tricks are genetically programmed in the octopus
1 seems unlikely because of the short lifespan of the animal, and the necessity of these tricks to stay alive (it seems like they would be eaten before they had enough time to learn the tricks). For this reason, let’s assume 2 is mostly correct.
So, over the course of million years of evolution, octopi have developed behavior that allows them to imitate different features of their environment. More specifically, they have developed pre-determined “programs”, which, when executed, cause their skin to show a “picture” of an animal, plant, or other feature in their environment.
When viewed from this perspective, the octopus is like a digital camera that nature has evolved! Just as a digital camera produces a string of 1s and 0s that, when read by the right software, can be converted into a photo of a flower, the octopus DNA contains strings of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, that can be converted into literal images of the environment that organism evolved in.
For most cameras, a long exposure is a photo taken over more than half a second, the octopus took these photos over millions of years!
[ Some people might argue that specific pictures and tricks aren’t pre-programmed in the octopus, only an extraordinary ability to mimic what it sees. I think this is unlikely, especially if you consider something like the case of the mimic octopus, which does not randomly disguise itself as species in its environment but mimics the predators of its predators (in order to scare off its natural predators), knowledge that it seems unlikely to be able to pick up sheerly through observation. ]
Here are some practical implications of this idea:
if you take an octopus from environment A, and drop it in environment B, it will continue to make the same “pictures” it was making in environment A, which are now inappropriate for environment B.
Most species of octopi have lived in essentially the same environment for hundreds of thousands of years. If climate change alters this environment quickly (essentially dropping an environment A octopus into environment B), they likely won’t be able to adapt quickly enough, and many of its defenses will become worthless.
Perhaps in the future we can learn something about how to use DNA to encode and store information by studying the octopus, as they seem to store something that is similar to the sort of information we like to store.
