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.
In this model, the density of cells is assumed to be constant. However, the timescale of the simulations is comparable to the doubling time of many bacteria. Because cell density is found to R6 be important in determining the morphology of communities, I suspect that reproduction is important in understanding the patterns. This point might be worth addressing in the text.