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Ephemeral aggregations of bacteria are ubiquitous in the environment, wherethey serve as hotbeds of metabolic activity, nutrient cycling, and horizontalgene transfer. In many cases, these regions of high bacterial concentration arethought to form when motile cells use chemotaxis to navigate to chemicalhotspots. However, what governs the dynamics of bacterial aggregations isunclear. Here, we use a novel experimental platform to create realisticsub-millimeter scale nutrient pulses with controlled nutrient concentrations.By combining experiments, mathematical theory and agent-based simulations, weshow that individual \textit{Vibrio ordalii} bacteria begin chemotaxis towardhotspots of dissolved organic matter (DOM) when the magnitude of the chemicalgradient rises sufficiently far above the sensory noise that is generated bystochastic encounters with chemoattractant molecules. Each DOM hotspot issurrounded by a dynamic ring of chemotaxing cells, which congregate in regionsof high DOM concentration before dispersing as DOM diffuses and gradientsbecome too noisy for cells to respond to. We demonstrate that \textit{V.ordalii} operates close to the theoretical limits on chemotactic precision.Numerical simulations of chemotactic bacteria, in which molecule counting noiseis explicitly taken into account, point at a tradeoff between nutrientacquisition and the cost of chemotactic precision. More generally, our resultsillustrate how limits on sensory precision can be used to understand thelocation, spatial extent, and lifespan of bacterial behavioral responses inecologically relevant environments.

Bacteria push the limits of chemotactic precision to navigate dynamic chemical gradients