In their response, the authors mention that with the lower value from Boal and Ng the trichomes collapse into a heap, and so a larger bending modulus was necessary.
All the results depend on the cohesion forces, which are described by a Lennard–Jones function in Equation 12, in Section 2.5. However, this way of approximating cohesion is not well justified, and in Section 2.9 (several sections later) the authors mention that in reality the attractive force “does not really exist” and that the trichomes cohere after contact. The authors are using an LJ interaction to approximate contact adhesion. They should say why, and address how good of an approximation they expect this to be.