Shepard et al. claim that the formation of the reticulate pattern occurs on a faster scale than cell growth and division, and so we did not consider this in our model. Including this might make the results more robust, however, and we added a comment to the discussion.
Notably, the introduction of reproduction does not introduce another parameter. As I recall, these cyanobacteria reproduce (with doubling time τ ) by adding cells to the filament and that filaments periodically break (rate k+). Thus, the length of a filament is not a model parameter. Rather, length is determined dynamically as ~ N k τ + (10)