Adaptability of Toxoptera aurantii (Hemiptera: Aphididae) to Different Tea Cultivars

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a sound study dealing with feeding habits of an important pest, Toxoptera aurantii. Unfortunately, there are major text, design, result and discussion overlaps with previous studies that included some of the authors, namely:

Jiang et al. Different host plants distinctly influence the adaptability of Myzus persicae (Hemiptera: Aphididae). Agriculture 2022, 12, 2162.

and

Lu et al. Different tea germplasms distinctly influence the adaptability of Toxoptera aurantii (Hemiptera: Aphididae). Insects 2023, 14, 695.

The second study isn't even cited in the current paper. I don't believe this article is suited for publication in its current form, until it is significantly rewritten. This is not a case of methods, which of course will have overlap, but whole sentences and paragraphs clearly taken or just slightly paraphrased from the two said papers.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review Agriculture-2610704 – 15/09/2022

General comment

In this letter, I give my opinion and comments on the manuscript entitled “Impact of the “Adaptability of Toxoptera aurantii (Hemiptera: Aphididae) to Different Tea Cultivars”.
The work focuses on the impact of different tea varieties on the feeding behavior and population dynamics of the tea aphid. It provides valuable knowledge that can help in a finer description of the pest, highlighting aspect so far not sufficiently described. The manuscript is interesting and scientifically sound, hence I recommend the publication in Agriculture after minor revisions.

Specific comments

Line 36: Define "adaptability", since it is a key term used through all the manuscript.

Line 85-86: at which light intensity?

Line 94: Explicit the phenological stage of the plants used in the EPG experiment.

Line 101: "insect and plant electrodes".

Line 102: "EPG device" instead of "biocurrent amplifier".

Line 102: "insect electrode".

Line 106: remove "input".

Line 109: Faraday cages are limiting the electrical noise, not sound.

Line 111-112: The photoperiod here is an unnecessary information, I guess all the recordings were conducted with daylight. A light intensity measure is missing from the text.

Line 121: "no-choice test".

Line 125: you really used a banister brush? Seems quite big for aphids.

Line 126: "experiment" misspelled.

Line 140: "behaviour" misspelled.

Line 157: "from start of the EPG recording".

Table 1 and 2 captions: Explicit that the absence of letters for some rows is due to non-significant differences.

Figure 1: The use of pie charts should always be discouraged in favour of bar plots, because the latter helps the reader to make easier direct comparisons among the treatments. Moreover, in the pie chart there is not the possibility to include error bars.

Line 198: Use the non-abbreviated form for scientific names in titles and subtitles.

Line 202: Unclear sentence, especially the locution "for 3 days". Reformulate.

Lines 204-208:
Missing a numerical range for the different populations (± SE, Quartiles, ..).
Moreover, in the Material and Methods section an explanation of how the authors counted the dead individuals is missing.

Figure 3. An explanation of the x- and y-axis is fundamental but missing. Add also that the pairwise comparisons were conducted between the cultivars within the day. I suggest also to move QC8 near FD to help maintaining a visual order, and help the readers to compare the bars.

Lines 232-234: Clarify what you mean, in the present form is quite unclear.

Line 250: Define "mechanical resistance", providing a reference for it. The definition is quite important since it is also used in the abstract.

Discussion section: A clear connection between the EPG and population dynamics results and the conclusions on those results is missing. I suggest to rephrase the section in order to increase the connections and the readability.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have conducted simple experiments aimed to estimate preference and performance of the tea aphid, Toxoptera aurantii on seven tea cultivars: The experiments were well designed and conducted and the data were properly analyzed. The results are important for the selection of resistant cultivars. Thus, the manuscript can be published. However, I would suggest some minor changes and corrections.

Line 25: Not “than that of on other cultivars” but “than that on other cultivars” (delete “of”).

Lines 71, 219: reference numbers should be separated either by commas (e.g. [17,18,19]) or by dash (e.g. [17-19]).

Line 140: not “Behaviuor” but either “Behavior” or “Behaviour”.

Lines 186-192: First, please, indicate what statistics was used to estimate the significance of the difference in the proportions of different feeding waveforms. Second, although this is not mandatory, it would be reasonable to show pairwise differences in Fig. 2, as they are shown in the tables.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

While the authors made some changes to the MS, there are still parts clearly just copied from their previous work (for example, lines 54, 70, 226). In their reply to the first round of reviews the authors state similarities because of the same corresponding author; going by the information provided for all three papers, this is not true. I am not going into the author's motivation or intent behind these copied parts of MS, just stating what is clearly visible to anyone who reads all three papers.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx