Extended Data Fig. 1: Diagram of wormPOP, an individual-based computational simulation model.

Worms exist in one of five nodes that are displayed as ovals and labeled egg, larva, adult, parlad and dauer. Diamond-shaped boxes indicate yes/no decisions. “culled?” indicates a stochastic decision whether an animal dies from culling or not.”Die of old age?” indicates a stochastic decision whether an adult animal dies from old age or not. “too long a dauer” indicates a stochastic decision whether a dauer stage animal dies from starvation or not. Other decisions are deterministic and depend on the number of time steps an animal has been in a stage, the mass of the animal in ng, or the amount of bacterial food ingested in a time step. Rectangular boxes indicate (1) bacterial ingestion, which depends on the size of the animal, the concentration of bacteria, and the appetite of other worms. Bacterial ingestion is somewhat stochastic, since it is influenced by other worms, and (2) growth and egg production.