“…Endospores of the model organism Bacillus subtilis have been isolated from almost every niche on Earth, but primarily from the soil and from the gut flora of organisms that (partially) feed directly from the ground, including chickens, pigs, mice, and also humans [1]. B. subtilis sporulates both in the rhizosphere environment of soil [2] and in the gut [3][4][5], and spores also revive there [2,5,6]. Diverse natural isolates have been characterized, and it was noted repeatedly that their sporulation kinetics is strikingly variable [4,7,8].…”