SWARMING BACTERIA MIGRATE BY LÉVY WALK

Individual swimming bacteria are known to bias their random trajectories in search of food and to optimize survival. The motion of bacteria within a swarm, wherein they migrate as a collective group over a solid surface, is fundamentally different as typical bacterial swarms show large-scale swirling and streaming motions involving millions to billions of cells. Here, by tracking trajectories of fluorescently labeled individuals within such dense swarms, we find that the bacteria are performing super-diffusion, consistent with Lévy walks. Lévy walks are characterized by trajectories that have straight stretches for extended lengths whose variance is infinite. The evidence of super-diffusion consistent with Lévy walks in bacteria suggests that this strategy may have evolved considerably earlier than previously thought.

Gil Ariel, Amit Rabani, Sivan Benisty, Jonathan D Partridge, Raskia M Harshey and Avraham Be`er. Nature Communications 6, 8396 (2015).