With your spores inside a small wall, you can reproduce on the drier areas of the tidal zones. This gives your offspring the opportunity to start rapidly photosynthesising as soon as they grow, and proves to be a very successful approach.
You are still a rather amorphous green plant, with most cells capable of growing and splitting if they get sufficient light input. This means your structure becomes rather lobe-like, or blobby.
Annoyingly, this means that one lobe can shadow another lobe which is a complete waste of all the energy gone on making the lower lobe, which is now unable to collect light. You are effectively in competition with your own body.
If you experience a mutation which turns off cell reproduction after a certain number of divisions, except for a few cells at the furthest tip of a lobe, then you will spread out further, and should be able to reduce the shadowing effect. If you don't you will possibly spread out more widely.
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