Life and Death near a Windy Oasis
Karin A. Dahmen, David R. Nelson, and Nadav M. Shnerb

TL;DR
This paper models how bacterial colonies near an oasis respond to wind, revealing a transition from survival to extinction as wind speed increases, with implications for understanding biological delocalization and extinction phenomena.
Contribution
It introduces a simple model combining diffusion, growth, death, and drift to analyze bacterial survival near an oasis under wind influence, highlighting a critical transition point.
Findings
At high wind velocities, bacteria are blown into deserts and die out.
A critical wind velocity exists where bacteria transition from survival to extinction.
Predictions are made for bacterial behavior in one and two dimensions.
Abstract
We propose a simple experiment to study delocalization and extinction in inhomogeneous biological systems. The nonlinear steady state for, say, a bacteria colony living on and near a patch of nutrient or favorable illumination (``oasis'') in the presence of a drift term (``wind'') is computed. The bacteria, described by a simple generalization of the Fisher equation, diffuse, divide A -> A+A, die A -> 0, and annihilate A+A -> 0. At high wind velocities all bacteria are blown into an unfavorable region (``desert''), and the colony dies out. At low velocity a steady state concentration survives near the oasis. In between these two regimes there is a critical velocity at which bacteria first survive. If the ``desert'' supports a small nonzero population, this extinction transition is replaced by a delocalization transition with increasing velocity. Predictions for the behavior as a…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics · Evolution and Genetic Dynamics · Ecosystem dynamics and resilience
