  We study the spreading of a bacterial colony undergoing turbulent like
collective motion. We present two minimalistic models to investigate the
interplay between population growth and coherent structures arising from
turbulence. Using Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of the proposed models we
find that turbulence has two prominent effects on the spatial growth of the
colony: (a) the front speed is enhanced, and (b) the front gets crumpled. Both
these effects, which we highlight by using statistical tools, are markedly
different in our two models. We also show that the crumpled front structure and
the passive scalar fronts in random flows are related in certain regimes.
