Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript under reviewing seems to be interesting in its content but it is very difficult to read and understand because its co-authors probably did not clearly define a purpose of the paper prepared by them. Even the Discussion and Conclusions are not enough clear and not quite correspondent to each other.

The content of this paper seems to be interesting and could be important for taxonomy of the subgenera considered in the manuscript under reviewing. The co-authors have to show this importance and how this importance can be used in taxonomy and phylogenetic reconstructions in additions to the co-authors’ declarations without facts.

English is not good and needs to be strongly improved. There are a lot of misprints and words with unclear meaning. It is not good to use in the same sentence the synonyms "broad" and "wide" because readers can think that authors use these two words with different meanings. Some sentences are not possible to understand at all, others are consisted of phrased without evident logic connections. The co-authors frequently used wrong terminology and some superfluous words making the text not clearly understandable at all. For example: “we … analyzed the morphology with a geometric morphometric technique” (in the end of the Introduction) showing that the co-authors regard the term “morphology” concerning not a science but something else. Such confusions are present in most sentences. The co-authors frequently used the “head morphology” instead “head structure” etc. It is strange why the co-authors used “higher taxa” for the subgeneric taxa, i.e. the lowest rank of supraspecies taxa… And so on ….

Some places of this manuscript were corrected in the file attached (see the Abstract, Introduction, Discussion and Conclusions, and some more). However, this manuscript can be reviewed in a proper way only after its text will be represented in a readable version.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

English is difficlt to understand because of a rather bad Grammar and very obscure meaning of the sententences in the text of MS.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1

Point 1:

The manuscript under reviewing seems to be interesting in its content but it is very difficult to read and understand because its co-authors probably did not clearly define a purpose of the paper prepared by them. Even the Discussion and Conclusions are not enough clear and not quite correspondent to each other.

The content of this paper seems to be interesting and could be important for taxonomy of the subgenera considered in the manuscript under reviewing. The co-authors have to show this importance and how this importance can be used in taxonomy and phylogenetic reconstructions in additions to the co-authors' declarations without facts.

Response 1: Thank you so much for your precious comments. Based on the feedback from three reviewers and the editor, we have made some revisions in Abstract and Conclusions sections to better clarify the main theme of our paper. We have changed our title into “Geometric morphometric analysis of genus Chaetocnema (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae: Alticini) with insights on its subgenera classification and morphological diversity”, which will highlight the morphological diversity section of this paper. In this paper, we tried to use the geometric morphometric method to solve one controversial issue in taxonomy——the subgenera classification of genus Chaetocnema. During the analysis, we also revealed the morphological diversity of the two subgenera (subgenus Chaetocnema s. str. and subgenus Udorpes) and three fauna of genus Chaetocnema. And the potential application of geometric morphometrics in higher taxa (supraspecies taxa) taxonomy was demonstrated.

 

Point 2: English is not good and needs to be strongly improved. There are a lot of misprints and words with unclear meaning.

Response 2: Thank you for your comment. Before the first submission, our manuscript has been revised by a colleague fluent in English writing for language editing. After this revision, the revised manuscript has been carefully checked by a colleague fluent in English writing again. As for the misprints marked by the reviewer in the .pdf file, there is a misunderstanding about the word “Palearctic”. It is another form of “Palaearctic” which is still widely used in other researches, and we would like to keep “Palearctic” in the text.

 

Point 3: It is not good to use in the same sentence the synonyms “broad” and “wide” because readers can think that authors use these two words with different meanings.

 Response 3: Thank you for your comment. The word “broad” has been replaced with “wide” if they are in the same sentence.

 

Point 4: The co-authors frequently used wrong terminology and some superfluous words making the text not clearly understandable at all. For example: “we...analyzed the morphology with a geometric morphometric technique”(in the end of the Introduction) showing that the co-authors regard the term “morphology” concerning not a science but something else. Such confusions are present in most sentences. The co-authors frequently used the “head morphology” instead “head structure” etc.

Response 4: Thank you for your comment. Some places concerning “morphology” were revised according to your comments, and we would like to keep the word in some necessary places.

 

Point 5: It is strange why the co-authors used “higher taxa” for the subgeneric taxa, i.e. the lowest rank of supraspecies taxa.

 Response 5: Thank you for your comment. Some places of “higher taxa” have been replaced with “supraspecies taxa”, following the reviewer’s comments in the attached file.

 

Point 6: Some places of this manuscript were corrected in the file attached (see the Abstract, Introduction, Discussion and Conclusions, and some more).

Response 6: Thank you for your comment. The comments in the file attached have been replied one by one and uploaded as a .pdf file. The revised places have been highlighted in the manuscript.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript by Zhang et al. entitles “Geometric morphometric analysis of genus Chaetocnema (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae: Alticini) with insights on its subgenera classification” aims at verifying the appropriateness of the two subgenera classification (subgenus Chaetocnema s.str. and Udorpes) of Chaetocnema genus. In my opinion, this work is of interest. The manuscript is well written, the analyses performed are in line with the aim, and the obtained results are of interest. Anyway, I have a few questions and suggestions for the authors.

 

One of the main questions regards the images used for this study. It is not clear to me how they were acquired. At line 95, the authors speak about “published images”, so do they derive from previously published studies? Also, no details about the morphological identification of the specimens are provided, e.g., who identified them, if they were identified from the photos or using dichotomous keys and stereomicroscope. Moreover, I’m wondering if just one specimen per species was analyzed in the GM analyses. In this case, I suggest improving the intraspecific sampling for having a more detailed picture of the variability of each character. Anyway, I can imagine it could be hard to obtain images of more than one specimen per each of the species considered in this study. For this reason, I suggest selecting a subsample of species for which obtaining images is easier and repeat the analyses on more than one specimens per species to confirm the results obtained. These analyses could complement the one already obtained on the full dataset.

Further minor suggestions are:

 

Rephrase the first sentence of the abstract for making it clearer, reading this sentence is not easy to understand what the authors mean.

 

Line 66. Please specify which are the name of the two subgenera of Chaetocnema this sentence refers to.

Lines 208-214. I suggest rephrasing these sentences, reporting the characters for which differences are significant or not significant, but reporting the p-values only between parenthesis.

Figure 3-4-7-8. It could be easier to read the results reported in these figures if you add the character name in the upper part of the corresponding biplot.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2

Point 1: One of the main questions regards the images used for this study. It is not clear to me how they were acquired. At line 95, the authors speak about “published images”, so do they derive from previously published studies? Also, no details about the morphological identification of the specimens are provided, e.g., who identified them, if they were identified from the photos or using dichotomous keys and stereomicroscope.

Response 1: Thank you for your comment. Images of species in the geometric morphometric analysis were collected from previously published studies (references 15,16,19 in the manuscript). And the identifiers are the authors of the previous studies, who are the specialists in Chaetocnema. Species of Figures 1&2 were identified by one author of this paper (Ruan Y.), who is also a specialist in Chaetocnema. The text has been rephrased to make it clear.

 

Point 2: Moreover, I'm wondering if just one specimen per species was analyzed in the GM analyses. In this case, I suggest improving the intraspecificd sampling for having a more detailed picture of the variability of each character. Anyway, I can imagine it could be hard to obtain images of more than one specimen per each of the species considered in this study. For this reason, I suggest selecting a subsample of species for which obtaining images is easier and repeat the analyses on more than one specimens per species to confirm the results obtained. These analyses could complement the one already obtained on the full dataset.

Response 2: Thank you for your comment. Some species were represented by more than one specimen from different fauna in the analysis, such as C. concinna, C. cylindrica, C. modesta (referring to the species list in Supplementary File S1). The text has been rephrased to make it clear. In addition, the intraspecific variation of Chaetocnema is rather small, and we plan to quantitatively analyze this degree of variation in our future research.

 

Point 3: Further minor suggestions are:

Rephrase the first sentence of the abstract for making it clearer, reading this sentence is not easy to understand what the authors mean.

Response 3: Thank you for your comment. The sentence was rephrased: “In taxonomy, qualitative methods are commonly used in analyzing morphological characters, which could lead to dramatic changes in higher taxa.”

 

Point 4: Line 66. Please specify which are the name of the two subgenera of Chaefocnema this sentence refers to.

Response 4: Thank you for your comment. The sentence was revised: “The traditional two subgenera of Chaetocnema (subgenus Chaetocnema s. str. Stephens, 1831 and subgenus Udorpes Motschulsky, 1845) has been recognized by many authors…”

 

Point 5: Lines 208-214. I suggest rephrasing these sentences, reporting the characters for which differences are significant or not significant, but reporting the p-values only between parenthesis.

Response 5: Thank you for your comment. The sentences was revised: “The two subgenera showed significant differences in pronotum, head, aedeagus and spermatheca shapes, with p-values for both Mahalanobis and Procrustes distances less than 0.05 (Table 1). The average shapes of the elytron between the two subgenera were not significantly different, with a p-value of 0.3499 for the Procrustes distance..”

 

Point 6: Figure 3-4-7-8. It could be easier to read the results reported in these figures if you add the character name in the upper part of the corresponding biplot.

Response 6: Thank you for your comment. The character names have been added in the corresponding biplots.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is an original and very laborious methodological study. It is all the more surprising that it does not contain considerable taxonomic results. The taxonomy of the genus has remained almost as confusing as it was before the study. Perhaps, Chaetocnema is not the optimal object for demonstrating the possibilities of the method.

It would be good to improve citations of taxa in the Introduction: add years of description and minimal synonymy, at least for the subgenus Tlanoma.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 3

Point 1: The article is an original and very laborious methodological study. It is all the more surprising that it does not contain considerable taxonomic results. The taxonomy of the genus has remained almost as confusing as it was before the study. Perhaps, Chaetocnema is not the optimal object for demonstrating the possibilities of the method.

It would be good to improve citations of taxa in the Introduction: add years of description and minimal synonymy, at least for the subgenus Tlanoma.

Response 1: Thank you for your comment. The Abstract and Conclusions sections have been revised to better clarify our viewpoints on the taxonomy of Chaetocnema. We will evaluate the application of the geometric morphometric method on other taxa except Chaetocnema in our further studies. More data and information will be revealed and discussed. The citations of taxa in the Introduction have been improved in the revised file.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript can be published in the current version. But small deffect is still present:

- Palearctic from Greek root which should be transliterated as ‘palaeo’ (ancient, older) - it means that the correct spelling is Palaearctic but not 'palearctic';
- Nearctic and Oriental regions but singular shound written as Nearctic Region (with capital letter);

- first sentence of the abstract: "In taxonomy, qualitative methods are commonly used in analyzing morphological characters, which could lead to dramatic changes in higher taxa." what means 'dramatic';

- higher taxa are family, order, class and so on but not lower supraspecies taxa as subgenus or genus;

- sentence 'Higher taxa are biological entities that are relatively easy to identify, and the origin of a new higher taxon has a long-term phylogenetic trend, involving the evolutionary changes of a large number of features' - indeed the taxa cannot have an origin because they are created by men, but not nature.

etc.

nevertheless, the content of the paper can be understood by readers.

 

the English grammar seems tp be OK

Reviewer 2 Report

I'm satisfied with the edits made by the authors. I suggest accepting the manuscript for publication in its present form.