Life and Death near a Windy Oasis

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.