Life and Death near a Windy Oasis

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 function of wind velocity are made for one and two dimensions.