Filaments rule and gave Rate Strategists an advantage.

Rate Strategists (RS, blue) and Yield Strategists (YS, red) competed in a 3D biofilm domain (200x200x12.5 μm) for 3 weeks. In the first 4 rows, different strategies competed. Column 1 corresponds to spherical cell scenarios in Fig 2 of Ref [59] but were now simulated in 3D. In column 2, RS formed filaments and in column 3, YS formed filaments. Filaments won regardless of strategy. In column 4, both formed filaments and RS won or likely won. The last 3 rows show single species ‘controls’ with 10, 20 or 100 initial agents. The first two columns show simulations with spherical YS or RS agents while the last two columns show filament forming YS or RS agents. See Fig 7 for corresponding time courses. Duplicate simulations are shown in Fig G in S1 Text. The filamentous microbes incorporate a basic life cycle in which initially spherical agents extend into rod shaped agents to further extend into multi-segmented filaments as described in S1.14.