Tire and Road Wear Particle-Containing Sediments with High Organic Content Impact Behavior and Survival of Chironomid Larvae (Chironomus riparius)
, Stefanie Krais 1,†, Katharina Peschke 1, Steffen Weyrauch 2, Rita Triebskorn 1,3 and Heinz-R. Köhler 1
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript deals with the question if different concentrations of tyre and road wear particles in sediments impact the behavior and survival of chironomid larvae. Furthermore, is was tested if sediment aeration reduces the adverse effects. The study design is sound and the given arguments are comprehensible. The conclusions and the implications of the results are rather short but mention interesting points. I have some remarks that should be addressed before publishing.
In general:
The study comprises several experiments and that makes it not so easy for the reader to follow the line. The authors already spent some effort on clarifying the red line but some points would further help.
First, the wording of the sediment description is quite confusing: Please indicate throughout the text when you are talking about the raw sediment (see e.g. specific comments). Moreover, it is not the “amount of sediment” (e.g. l.24-25) that drives your results but the proportion of “raw” sediment. Furthermore, it would be great if you could replace the term “raw” by “burdened” or “contaminated” or something similar throughout the text.
Second: Structure of results: Please provide the numbers of the experiments as indicated in Table 1 also in the text and sort the table (or the results presentation) in the same order. That would help a lot to find a way through the manifold experiments.
Specific comments:
l. 2: Title: I would recommend to replace “high organic” by “low oxygen” as it is much closer to the analyses you did. Maybe you can include “tyre wear” or expend the abbreviation in the title?
ll. 15-17: The reasoning that something is studied because there are not many details known is not good. Please provide a comprehensible reason why people should read this article.
l. 19: Please provide more information about the experimental set up. Include that mixing of sediment (with sand) resulted in different concentrations of TRWP in sediments resulting in a gradient of different concentrations that could be tested.
ll. 24-26: It is not the amount of sediment but proportion of raw /burdened or contaminated sediment that lead to the described results. The amount of sediment stays the same in the experiments but the composition was altered.
l. 58: Please delete “quickly”
l. 220: Please mention here why you added different proportions of sand. What was the aim of this and what did you want to study with this?
L 243: Please provide more information how you counted the number of chimneys. How did you separate them from the sediment? Did you sieve it?
L 267 (Table 1): Please give these experiment numbers also in the text of the results chapter. It would be great to present the results in the order of this table or to change the experiment number to the order of the presentation in the results chapter. As it is now, it is quite confusing.
l. 384: Please write “proportion of contaminated sediment” or something similar.
L 404 Figure 3: I don’t understand why these letters are presented in two rows. What is compared? Different parameters? Can they be presented in one line? If not, please indicate the different parameters and what is compared in which line.
L 422: please replace “significantly increased” by “was significantly higher”
l. 494: Please replace “pure” by “undiluted” or “only contaminated” or something similar as “pure sediments” are confusing as it may relate to unpolluted sediments without TRWP
ll. 539-542: Are these experiments really relevant for this study? I cannot see it.
ll. 552-553: Please specify these sediments (contaminated, burdened or something else), please remove the second “in”
l. 602: Why “and their leachates”? You never mentioned leachates before in the manuscript. Either remove it or give elaborate this argument.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1,
we want to thank you for your valuable time spent on critically going through our study and providing helpful remarks that significantly contribute to improve the presentation and comprehensibility of our work.
Please find detailed information on our changes in the attachment and in our manuscript in which the changes are “change-tracked” and thus highlighted.
With best regards,
Tatjana Tull, on behalf of all authors
Attached File: Tull_et_al_Environments_Minor_Revisions_Responses_Reviewer_1
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Line 40: „MP; <5 mm; [3]) 40 and even nannoplastics (NP; 1–1000 nm; [4]“ But: 1000 nm is also less than 5mm. As written, NP are only special case of MP.
Line 83: „Wagner [26]L should be Wagner et al. The same problem in line 84 and further (92 etc.).
Line 97: „(syn. Chironomus thummi 97 KIEFFER, 1911)“ why this one synonym out of many others ís cited?
Line 99: “estimated 20,000 species” Add source of this info, now about 8000 spp. are described.
Line 103: “C. riparius” Sentence should not start with abbreviation.
Line 129: 40,41 (blank missing).
Line 368: why underlined words? And again in the following table.
Line 378: “The differences in mortality were also significantly different” (?)
Fig. 4A: legend on vertical axis: n° (?) More common is „No.“
To add into discussion: If results indicate negative effect on stress tolerant species, what about non-tolerant? Interesting would be if authors found chironomid larvae in water bodies in close vicinity of study sites (e.g., reservoir on Fig. D).
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2,
we want to thank you for your valuable time spent on critically going through our study and providing helpful remarks that significantly contribute to improve the presentation and comprehensibility of our work.
Please find detailed information on our changes in the attachment and in our manuscript in which the changes are “change-tracked” and thus highlighted.
With best regards,
Tatjana Tull, on behalf of all authors
Attached File: Tull_et_al_Environments_Minor_Revisions_Responses_Reviewer_2
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
