  Biological and living organisms sense and process information from their
surroundings, typically having access only to a subset of external observables
for a limited amount of time. In this work, we uncover how biological systems
can exploit these accessible degrees of freedom (DOFs) to transduce information
from the inaccessible ones with a limited energy budget. We find that optimal
transduction strategies may boost information harvesting over the ideal case in
which all DOFs are known, even when only finite-time trajectories are observed,
at the price of higher dissipation. We apply our results to red blood cells,
inferring the implemented transduction strategy from membrane flickering data
and shedding light on the connection between mechanical stress and transduction
efficiency. Our framework offers novel insights into the adaptive strategies of
biological systems under non-equilibrium conditions.
