George ILIEV
The mantis shrimp is a fascinating 30-cm crustacean in the tropical oceans. It is famous for its unusual colour vision (with 12 colour photoreceptors in the eyes) but also for the brutal force and lightning speed with which it stuns and catches its prey. The shrimp's sudden and powerful blow to mollusc or crab shells shatters them to pieces. It is even known to break aquarium glass with its massive clubs.
Research into the structure of the shrimp's claws carried out at the University of California, Riverside, shows that the clubs are composed of three separate layers of bony tissue. The big differences in orientation, stiffness and hardness between the layers allows small cracks to appear in each layer but stops these cracks from spreading across the entire structure. Counterintuitively, "nature prevents catastrophic failures by allowing local failures."
In the terminology of probability theorist Nassim Taleb, this would be the perfect example of anti-fragility, as described in his 2012 book "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder". In the field of biomimicry, the multiple-layer structure is giving rise to bulletproof materials.
In the startup world, the principle of allowing small cracks is known as "fail fast, fail often". Small failures are part of establishing product/market fit and have saved many a startup from doom. The entrepreneurs who "fail forward" are forced to pivot towards new products, markets and business models and are thus more likely to succeed.
Photo: Mantis shrimp (Source: Wikipedia)
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