Left-hand panel: the star formations rates (M_⊙ yr⁻¹) of the fully disrupted building blocks (black line with red band) and the surviving satellites (blue line with light blue band) in haloes A–E, weighted by the mass of that galaxy at that time of star formation. At each time, the sum of the weights of the fully disrupted building blocks as well as those of the surviving satellites add up to one for each of these five Aquarius haloes (∑_iw_i = 1), after which the median is plotted (black and blue lines) as well as the 30–70 percentiles (red and light blue bands). The corresponding redshift is shown at the top axis. In the zoom-in panel, the SFRs in the first Gyr are shown. Adding those satellites that are stripped by at least two-thirds of their original stellar mass to the building blocks (to include also the main progenitors of spheroids C and D) did not significantly change this figure. Right-hand panel: the same mass-weighting is used to show the 30–50–70 percentiles of haloes A–E virial masses of building blocks as a function of lookback time (black line with grey band) and those of surviving satellites (green line with light green band). Again, the zoom-in panel shows the first Gyr of galaxy formation.