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The capacity to sense gradients efficiently and acquire information about theambient environment confers many advantages like facilitating movement towardnutrient sources or away from toxic chemicals. The amplified dispersal evincedby organisms endowed with motility is possibly beneficial in related contexts.Hence, the connections between information acquisition, motility, and microbialsize are explored from an explicitly astrobiological standpoint. By using priortheoretical models, the constraints on organism size imposed by gradientdetection and motility are elucidated in the form of simple heuristic scalingrelations. It is argued that environments such as alkaline hydrothermal vents,which are distinguished by the presence of steep gradients, might be conduciveto the existence of "small" microbes (with radii of $\gtrsim 0.1$ $\mu$m) inprinciple, when only the above two factors are considered; other biologicalfunctions (e.g., metabolism and genetic exchange) could, however, regulate thelower bound on microbial size and elevate it. The derived expressions arepotentially applicable to a diverse array of settings, including thoseentailing solvents other than water; for example, the lakes and seas of Titan.The paper concludes with a brief exposition of how this formalism may be ofpractical and theoretical value to astrobiology.

Theoretical constraints imposed by gradient detection and dispersal on microbial size in astrobiological environments