On my Recent Visit, from Victor Niederhoffer

June 3, 2014 |

On my recent visit to the Boston aquarium I had the pleasure of seeing 5 chambered nautilus. The nautilus has existed relatively unchanged for 500 million years, and is the longest lived cephalapod at 20 years, so it must have many lessons to teach us. What do you think it might teach us about markets other than changing its behavior, depth, and speed in the day and night, and building larger and larger chambers in a Fibonacci series as it grows, and using its 100 tentacles independently to catch food, and using its hard shell to protect itself, and moving very slowly except when it has to escape when it uses jet propulsion, and its camouflage in the night?

Pitt T. Maner III writes:

On a similar note, a blue leg hermit crab (possibly Cilbanarius tricolor) caught my attention on Clarke Beach in Palm Beach last week (a beach where I once found many years ago the fantastic shell of a paper nautilus/argonaut–best find ever).

Mr. Hermit was a very cautious fellow and quick to withdraw into his shell at the slightest vibration or passing of a shadow and took several, patient minutes before determining the "coast was clear" to begin walking again with his shell home. After finding a nice clump of seaweed and other shells to blend in with, however, Mr. H was content to stay relatively motionless until the tide came back in. I imagine the tricolor leg markings are a bit disconcerting for a predator trying to figure out if Mr. H is edible–the blue looks absolutely toxic!

One scientist who has brought lessons learned from observations of the predator-prey rich California tidal pools to other fields (including national security) is Dr. Rafe Sagarin.

In the speech below Sagarin discusses the powerful lessons to be learned from nature and tips a hat to an earlier biologist, Edward F. Ricketts (of Steinbeck, "The Log from the Sea of Cortez" fame). He notes the need for organisms to leave the "comfort zone" and adapt at times when predation becomes intense and notes that they do not plan, predict or try to be perfect. Sagarin points out the mola mola as an unlikely design for a very successful fish. His take is that animals tend to "learn" from successes and not failures. Adapt and overcome, to use a military phrase, is the evolutionary order for the day.

He thinks the octupus to have a beautiful brain and wrote a book in praise of the animal: Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease by Rafe Sagarin

I found this article by Rafe very interesting: "How an octopus can help us thwart terrorists"

EVERYTHING would be better if we learned from nature, says Rafe Sagarin.

A couple of more links of possible interest:

A youtube talk about the octopus by Rafe Sagarin: "Learning From The Octopus: Unleashing Nature's Secrets of Adaptation"

Rafe Sagarin's website