Evolution of multicellular life cycles under costly fragmentation
Fig 4
Fragmentations by binary and (nearly) equal split partitions are likely to evolve in random environments.
The top panels present the ten most frequent fragmentation modes for (A) fragmentation with delay, (B) fragmentation with increased death risk and (C) fragmentation with cell loss, respectively. Each bar shows the frequency of the corresponding life cycle to be evolutionarily optimal. The colour of the bar represents the class of the life cycle, see Fig 3. (Nearly) equal split life cycles are represented in the form of 1+ … + 1 and the total number of cells Σ. The bottom panels (D—F) present the fractions of each of binary fragmentation, (nearly) equal split, seeding, and other allowed fragmentation modes as functions of fragmentation cost for the same scenarios. The majority of random environments promote the evolution of (nearly) equal split and binary fragmentation modes.