This communication elaborates the rheological behavior of bioconvection flow of Powell–Eyring hybrid nanofluid over a stretchable heated cylinder embedded in Darcy–Forchheimer porous medium. The single and two-phase nanofluid models are used as mixture model by taking volumetric friction and dual diffusion of injected nanomaterial’s, while the Buongiorno model takes the dual diffusion of nanomaterials, allowing us to evaluate the thermophoresis and Brownian diffusion properties. The governing equations are solved with an efficient Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg numerical technique. The effects of appropriate parameters on flow, temperature, concentration, and motile microorganism. Our findings reveal that the fluid velocity increases with curvature parameter, while detract with Darcy and porosity parameter. Temperature is increasing function of Brownian, thermophoresis and heat source parameters. The concentration and motile profile increases with curvature parameter. An escalating trend for energy and mass transport was seen against curvature and thermophoresis parameter. Higher values of Curvature and Schmidt number depict positive impact on nanoparticle concentration, while the results for chemical reaction are conflicting. An increasing value of Brownian and thermophoresis parameters promote higher temperature. The temperature and thermal boundary layer thickness are also affected by the heat source and sink parameters in opposite manner.