Sympatric Bat Species Prey Opportunistically on a Major Moth Pest of Pecans
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors
I really appreciate your manuscript “Sympatric bat species prey opportunistically on a major moth pest of pecans”. It is a very interesting manuscript that reports results on a tightly linked host-parasite system: Pecan trees, the destructive pecan nut casebearer (PNC) moth, and sympatric bat species. The authors used a quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay of fecal DNA to document predation. I found the multispecies approach and the results obtained very interesting. The section on techniques to preserve and increase bats activity in agroecosystems is very important. The statistical analysis is rich and well structured.
I only highlighted some minor points to improve your manuscript before the publication. Thus, I recommend your study be accepted for publication in Sustainability with minor revisions.
Minor points:
Considering that the two monitoring techniques (pheromone trap catches vs. black light) resulted not consistent, why did you not assess the damage to understand which of the two techniques represented the most likely population? It could be useful to support the sentence in L401-403. In L 51, 222, and 410, the “)” is missing. In L 97 and different parts of the document, the hours are reported in an unusual format. I think it is better to put a ":" between hours and minutes. Please check the editorial guidelines. In L 155, please use W instead of w for Watt. In L 248 is cited figure 4a but the sentence is referred to figure 3a, please change 4 with 3. In L 264, “Table 1” in bold, considering the sentence as the table caption. Figure 4 lacks quality in some parts, please improve the resolution and graphics to make data easier to interpret, this data is very important. In the supplementary material, there is confusion between the “table” and the “figure”.
Author Response
Please see attachment for responses to the reviewer.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper by Braun de Torrez et al presents a tidy study that relates foraging in bats to potential pest suppression in pecan orchards. The paper is well written and the results clearly presented. My only comments are that the authors should better explain the potential role of bats and other generalist in the introduction. For example, avoiding the idea that predators produce population cycling and referring more to their role in regulation or pest suppression (which are different factors). Studies suggest that for insects, both are required.
The authors seem a little too confident in the qPCR technique without examining what the results actually mean. The same could be said, although to a lesser extent with the pheromone trap results of PNC. Based on the mismatch between trapping and qPCR results, a number of possibilities arise. The authors have explored some of these with respect to pheromone trap results, but not qPCR. For example, if bats are selectively capturing more females than males, which may be the case in some species, are qPCR results higher due to fertilized eggs in the abdomen? How would this affect the interpretation of results and what would it mean for pest suppression. Is there some way that such information could be better explored.
Finally, I would suggest that on the graphs, the axis lable fonts could be increased, they are currently too small to read comfortably. Also, is there some reason that figure 3 uses bar graphs in A and whisker plots in B?
Overall, this is a very nice paper and presents some great results from a very special system for readers.
Author Response
Please see attachment for responses to the reviewer.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
