Review Reports - Phylogeny and Morphology Determine Vulnerability to Global Warming in <i>Pristimantis</i> Frogs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a very well-written and interesting paper. It deals with an important, topical issue that should be of strong interest to the readership. I had only a few suggestions for improvement

-Lines 147-148: I would have liked to have seen more information about the phylogeny used. Anuran phylogeny is a topic of considerable recent study, so a summary of why this particular phylogeny was used would be useful to the readers of this paper.

-This is an editorial decision, but if space allows, I would re-consider using the various abbreviations for the habitat variables. Rather hard for the reader to remember that CP = “cattle pasture”.

-Lines 217-228: Since body size is a major impact variable here, should you not be looking at the phylogenetic signal for body size?

-Line 261: Not clear what “phylogeny hypothesis" needs to be in italics here (or Line 282).

-Line 296: I recommend that “Conclusions” be changed to “Implications for Climate Change Impacts” or something similar. Otherwise, it loses some of its impact

Author Response

Reviewer number 1

This is a very well-written and interesting paper. It deals with an important, topical issue that should be of strong interest to the readership. I had only a few suggestions for improvement

Thanks for your comments

Now reads: To account for phylogeny, we used a phylogenetic tree from (Jetz & Pyron, 2018) chosen at random using the function ‘sample’. This phylogeny is the most complete amphibian phylogeny up to date comprising 7,238 amphibian species.

Abbreviations have been changes across the manuscript for CP, YSF, OSF AND PF.

-Lines 217-228: Since body size is a major impact variable here, should you not be looking at the phylogenetic signal for body size?

We agree that body size is a very relevant variable in our study. As such, we did obtained the phylogenetic signal for body size shown on Line 2018 (λ = 0.91).

-Line 261: Not clear what “phylogeny hypothesis" needs to be in italics here (or Line 282).

Both sections have been changes and are not in italics anymore.

-Line 296: I recommend that “Conclusions” be changed to “Implications for Climate Change Impacts” or something similar. Otherwise, it loses some of its impact

Thanks you for your comments. Now it reads “Conservation implications”

References

Jetz, W., & Pyron, R. A. (2018). The interplay of past diversification and evolutionary isolation with present imperilment across the amphibian tree of life. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2, 850–858. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0515-5

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript presents an interesting research that has potential, but it also has some major flaws and cannot be published in its current form. I have two main issues:

1. The phylogeny methods are not described and the two sentences in this section virtually make no sense at all.

2. Some of the species are present with only a few individuals (incl. one species with a single individual), which is simply not enough for quality analyses.

I suggest that the authors include detailed description of their methods regarding phylogeny and reduce the number of species they work with to species that they have 20+ individuals captured. This, in my opinion, is mandatory in order for the manuscript to proceed with the review process.

Secondary issues are the questionable decisions to not weigh and determine the sex of the captured frogs – the authors should explain why they have chosen to omit this easily doable step in their research (they had the frogs for days, and did measure their SVL).

Additional comments are provided below:

Lines 99-104: Were all species identified purely by their morphology? Please cite an appropriate reference for identification.

From Table S1 it is clear that individuals from only three species comprise 146 of the total 222 frogs captured. Five species are present with less than 10 individuals (three of these with only 1-2 frogs), and you should explain why you have chosen to include these in your analyses.

Lines 119-120: Body condition indices are a good indicator of physical traits, and you could have calculated BCI if you had weighted the frogs, but you did not do it. Why?

Lines 146-148: I am sorry, but this does not make sense to me. You should provide more details.

Lines 157-159: Considering that some species were only represented by a single individual, I don't think this approach is reliable.

Lines 176-177: But it does appear that there is a significant difference between species? What is more concerning, the species presented with only a few individuals are shown to have the highest CTmax - I am not convinced that these results are reliable.

Lines 218-219: I think that this statement is a little too bold, tone it down.

Lines 222-224: I still think that the fact that some of these species are present with only 1-6 individuals is a major problem.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The ms summarizes an interesting approach to desentangle the effects of phylogeny and environment on the CTmax of Pristimantis frogs in Colombia. The study is well done and presented (see minor comments at the pdf). I feel that this study is a major contribution to predict the effect of climate warming in these montane neotropical frogs.

I have only two recommendations:

1) You should explain in more detail how you identified and distinguished the Pristimantis specimens. This is taxonomically challenging group and species are not easily distinguished,

2) The acclimation procedure should be explained in more detail. It may make a difference to acclimate a frog for only 3 days compared to 5 days. Keeping them at 2200 m in terraria is not actually an acclimation. Acclimation means constant temperature and LD regime for all specimens.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I think that after the revision, the manuscript is more coherent and can be published in its current form, with only one minor change:

Lines 213-216 (Figure 1): There are actually two figures shown? I think the upper one (with the 12 species) should be removed and only the lower one (the updated figure with 7 species) remains. Also, there appears to be a typo in the figure caption, it should read "across all 7 species", not "across all 204 species".

Author Response

Thank you for your comments.

We deleted the Figure containing 12 species from the manuscript.

Thank you for noticing our typo. The caption of figure 1 has been updated and now it reads:

Figure 1. Pristimantis frog phylogeny. (A) Mean CT_max ± SE per species. Dash line represents mean CT_max across all seven species. (B) Mean SVL ± SE per species.