Nov. 1, 2012 For the kinds of animals that are most familiar to
us -- ones that are big enough to see -- it's a no-brainer: Is
it better to sit around and wait for food to come to you, or to
move around and find it? Larger animals that opt to sit around
aren't likely to last long. But for bacteria out in the ocean,
the question is a far more complicated one. Oceanographers have
long assumed that because turbulence distributes nutrients
uniformly through the water, and because the ability of tiny
organisms to move around is insignificant compared to this
turbulence, there was no reason for such creatures to move at
all. Sea-dwelling bacterial life, they believed, should consist
just of static feeders. That view has now been upended by
research conducted by Roman Stocker, an associate professor in
MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and
John R. Taylor, a former MIT postdoc who is now a lecturer in
applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge
University. It turns out that swimmer