Science News

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.

Octopi in frigid Antarctic waters use a trick called RNA editing to customize crucial nervous system proteins to work at low temperatures.