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Life and death near a windy oasis

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1110 W. Green St. Dahmen-ID Current address Department of Physics,D. Nelson,N. Shnerb

Published 1998 in Journal of Mathematical Biology

ABSTRACT

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.

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