Adaptive Motility in the Simplest Marine Micro-animals

Marine micro-animals live in a highly fluctuating environment. They face a barrage of life threatening situations during their life cycle and survive in a low-nutrient resource bath. Navigating under such conditions requires perpetual adaptation to the local habitat. Here we examine the motility of one of the simplest marine micro-animals by carefully manipulating the local physio-chemical conditions. We find that they optimise their motility by switching between fast and slow mobility states. The adaptive motility behaviour is mapped to a physio-chemical phase space, and a theoretical model explaining these phenomena is proposed.