In recent decades, an interest has been developed towards the thermal consequences of nanofluid because of utilization of nano-materials to improve the thermal conductivity of traditional liquid and subsequently enhance the heat transportation phenomenon. Following this primarily concept, this current work investigates the thermal developed flow of third-grade nanofluid configured by a stretched surface with additional features of activation energy, viscous dissipation and second-order slip. Buongiorno’s nanofluid model is used to explore the thermophoresis and Brownian motion features based on symmetry fundamentals. It is further assumed that the nanoparticles contain gyrotactic microorganisms, which are associated with the most fascination bioconvection phenomenon. The flow problem owing to the partial differential equations is renovated into dimensional form, which is numerically simulated with the help of bvp4c, by using MATLAB software. The aspects of various physical parameters associated to the current analysis are graphically examined against nanoparticles’ velocity, temperature, concentration and gyrotactic microorganisms’ density distributions. Further, the objective of local Nusselt number, local Sherwood number and motile density number are achieved numerically with variation of various parameters. The results presented here may find valuable engineering applications, like cooling liquid metals, solar systems, power production, solar energy, thermal extrusion systems cooling of machine equipment, transformer oil and microelectronics. Further, flow of nanoparticles containing gyrotactic microorganisms has interesting applications in microbial fuel cells, microfluidic devices, bio-technology and enzyme biosensors.