Fig. 9

Simulation results of one versus two informative environments. Migration of daughter cells into new environments promoted the evolution of asymmetric memory to be passed on to the mother cells at cell division. 20 simulations were run for 100’000 time steps with 10’000 cells in total for each of the two environment types described in Fig. 8. Cells were initialized with randomly generated trait values for the four components of protection. For each time step in the simulation cells survived and reproduced depending on the individual protection level. Left panels: The lower and upper boundary of each area corresponds to the minimal and maximal trait value of the 20 simulation runs at each simulation step. The line corresponds to the median trait value. Right panels: For each trait the distributions of the trait values at the end (time point 100’000) of the simulation of the 20 × 10’000 individuals across all 20 simulations is displayed. a When all cells were kept in a single environment, the memory distribution factor trait of the 20 simulations with different initial values did not converge (orange, 0.43, standard error: 0.08), but evolved to an extreme (close to 0 or close to 1) in most of the replicated populations (see Additional file 4: Figure S8.2 left panels for trait distributions of single simulation runs). b When some of the daughter cells migrated to a different environment, asymmetric segregation of cellular protection to the mother cells evolved (orange trajectories converged to a low value; mean: 0.092, standard error: 0.007)