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Peritrichous bacteria synchronize and bundle their flagella to actively swimwhile disruption of the bundle leads to tumbling. It is still not known whetherthe number of flagella represents an evolutionary adaptation towards optimizingbacterial navigation. Here, we study the swimming dynamics of differentiallyflagellated Bacillus subtilis strains in a quasi-two-dimensional system. Wefind that decreasing the number of flagella N reduces the average turning anglebetween two successive run phases and enhances the duration and directionalpersistence of the run phase. As a result, having less flagella is beneficialfor long-distance transport and fast spreading, while having a lot of flagellais advantageous for the processes which require localization and slow dynamics,such as biofilm formation. We develop a two-state random walk model thatincorporates spontaneous switchings between the states and yields exactanalytical expressions for transport properties, in remarkable agreement withexperiments. The results of numerical simulations based on our two-state modelsuggest that the efficiency of searching and exploring the environment isoptimized at intermediate values of N. The optimal choice of N, for which thesearch time is minimized, decreases with increasing the size of the environmentin which the bacteria swim.

Flagellar number governs bacterial spreading and transport efficiency