Concentrated bacterial suspensions spontaneously develop transient spatiotemporal patterns of coherent locomotion whose correlation lengths greatly exceed the size of individual organisms. Continuum models have indicated that a state of uniform swimming order is linearly unstable at finite wavelengths, but have not addressed the nonlinear dynamics of the coherent state, with its biological implications for mixing, transport, and intercellular communication. We investigate a specific model incorporating hydrodynamic interactions in thin-film geometries and show by numerical studies that it displays large scale persistently recurring vortices, as actually observed.

• Received 7 August 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.75.040901