In the paper we justify (at some length) the bending modulus we used, which we extrapolated from various sources, and explain why we believe the value in Boal and Ng’s study is likely too low. The reviewer did not question the logic or the sources used to arrive at this value, but nevertheless seemed surprised at the result. The reviewer claims that the parameter falls outside of the physical regime, but doesn’t offer a justification other than that the implied persistence length “seems too large”. However, the large persistence length simply implies that the cyanobacteria are stiff enough that they are largely unaffected by thermal fluctuations. Despite this, the trichomes in our simulations are still quite flexible in practice, as can be seen in Figure 4. Even if the virtual trichomes are somewhat too stiff, we do not feel that this would have a major impact on the results.
While the authors might be able to find a similar phenomenological agreement with more reasonable parameters, it will change all of their results and amounts to a substantial revision.