Evolution of Insect Pollination Before Angiosperms and Lessons for Modern Ecosystems
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsI really liked this manuscript, drawing to our attention the importance of insects in fertilizing plants before there were many angiosperms around. The authors have utilized knowledge from entomology, botany, and paleobiology to put together a fascinating description of the evolution of present-day pollination from very early plant/arthropod interactions. I found it very well written and easy to follow. All figures and charts are appropriate and I have only a few small corrections that are needed.
- Lines 231, 239 and perhaps other places – the usual plural of proboscis is proboscides, change all other versions to that. It is used correctly in line 395.
- Figure 8 – the left and right are confused. The female is left (as the reader sees it), male is right
- Be sure to italicize all Latin names throughout, e.g. Bombus terrestris in line 569
- Reading through the literature cited I notice that the authors need to format the citations uniformly and as required by the journal.
Author Response
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Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsI believe the manuscript is ambitious, with extensive bibliography, novel, well-structured, and useful for understanding the morphology and fossil evidence of pollination prior to angiosperms.
Overall, I find it good and well-written, but the long paragraphs could be shortened.
Below, I point out some errors or elements that I believe should be corrected and/or added to improve the quality of the work:
Inconsistency between the abstracts and the introduction regarding the appearance of pollinators 200 or 300 million years before flowering plants.
Some figures are not referenced in the text.
Line 79, separate: independentlyacross.
The references are not consistent in format.
I suggest including a glossary of paleontological and entomological terms and a table summarizing the topics covered in the review.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe manuscript is very impressive work - It first, describes pre-angiosperm pollination syndromes and evolutionary phases of plant–insect interactions, and explicitly uses information from fossil findings research to present the notion of resilience of pollination under Anthropocene stress. However, I have some comments on the text:
1) The text under “Figure 4.” is just a repetition of the Lines 234-240: “The Permian saw the decline of palaeopterans (Shcherbakov et al. 2009; Aristov et al. 2013) and the rise of neopterans such as early bugs, thrips, and early holometabolans (beetles, lacewings and stem mecopteroids), while Orthoptera and Grylloblattodea diversified among Polyneoptera (Labandeira 2019; Prokop et al. 2023; Beutel et al. 2024). These groups also evolved increasingly specialized mouthparts from basic chewing mouthparts (Figure 5): Acercaria developed piercing sucking styles, and holometabolans produced the earliest siphonate, non-piercing proboscises, establishing the major mouthpart classes that persist today (Wootton 1981; Labandeira 2019; Prokop et al. 2023).”, please provide the appropriate text under this figure, with the needed explanation.
2) Lines 302-305, please re-write, the meaning in ambiguous.
3) Lines 319-320: “This Mesozoic flora, in terms of classes, represented the peak historical diversity of insect-pollinated seed plant lineages.”, there are probably missing words, please edit.
4) Lines 368-371: Decoy mechanisms common in modern cycads (thermogenesis, volatiles) were likely present in Bennettitales and other Mesozoic gymnosperms [32,33,96] and likely mimicked, in Early Cretaceous, by certain basic angiosperms with large, showy flowers, similarly pollinated [6,93,97–99].”, the phrasing “likely mimicked” seams not the most appropriate.
5) Lines 469-470, “Finally, Mesozoic sees the great radiation of beetles; larval feeding on gymnosperm sporophylls is known since Middle Triassic and persists in modern cycad mutualisms.”, it is not consistent with the explanations in Lines 348-351: “However, although there is evidence of associations between cycads and beetles dating back to Mesozoic [23,44,83], cycad-specific lineages of modern weevils currently the most important and diverse host-specific pollinators of extant cycads are relatively young, and likely derived from a shifting from angiosperm hosts to these plants [33,84].”
Kind regards,
Author Response
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