Maintaining Viability with Multiple Needs

How do organisms remain viable in environmental conditions that do not meet all of their needs? Often, different modes of behavior and ecological resources cannot be sufficiently achieved simultaneously. As a result, organisms must make judgements regarding priority, counterbalancing as they precariously move from one physical limit to the next. Here, we produce a minimal protocell model that allows us to explore this dynamic, and in the process see how previously developed methods of analysis in viability theory hold up when applied to a higher dimensional system. One distinction we come across is that an environment made up of conditions revealed as not being survivable by a parametric scan can nonetheless be sustainable for an agent traversing across those different possibilities. The result of this is that the only way to tell how survivable a specific environment will be for an organism is to understand the interaction between behavioral and metabolic dynamics.