Delineating the active and passive components in bacterial swarming

Bacteria are simplest living organisms capable of complex behaviours such as coherent collective movement. One such phenomenon is swarming. Swarming colony of pseudomonas aeruginosa has rich features which can give insights into collective intelligence in primitive organisms. We show that a recently described surfactant driven model [1] exhibits seemingly intelligent behaviour showing that many features observed in the swarming can arise from a purely non intelligent phenomena. This leads to new questions as to how we can delineate active intelligent behaviour of bacteria from passive fluid physics in swarming? For instance, do they have any control over the movement? We report few experiments that probe the active component of the phenomena involving motility of the bacteria and plausibly the collective decision making and can further our understanding about the role of bacteria in swarming.