Influence of Growth and Recruitment Parameters in the Assessment and Management Variables of the Yellow Squat Lobster (Cervimunida johni)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I consider the manuscript interesting and well written. Since I am not an expert on the problematics related to the marine sciences, I evaluated the paper mostly from the perspective of the methodology used for the simulations. My main concern is about the choice of the values of parameters used in simulations. It is not clear, why the autors decided for the ten percent change in the length at first capture or coefficient of variation, similarly also the choice of the recruiment variability values seems in the current version of paper unfounded. Also the presentation of results is not easy understandable. If the input parameters would be changing continuously, or at least at some grid, it would be possible to plot the dependency between the input and output parameters and therefore provide a more detailed and exhaustive analysis of the stated problem. On the other hand, as I am avare of the complexity of the whole simulated system, these comments are meant as a suggestion for the further research of the authors. 

Nevertheless, I would like to ask authors to do a minor changes in the current manuscript. More specifically, the choise of the input parameters needs to be better justified. I did not find an information how the differences in input parameters, related to the gender, were treated in the simulation. Even though this information may be hidden in tables 2 and 3, I think it should be stated within the text. Finally, in the current version of the manuscript the labeling of figures and tables as well as references is not working. Please keep an eye on it before the final submition.

Author Response

• We introduce changes only in the Materials and methods section, and specifically, subsection 2.1 Testing the growth and recruitment parameters. We modified mainly the first and second paragraphs of section 2.1 in the old version of the manuscript, to introduce changes that account for the justification of the chosen parameters used in our work. The last paragraph did no suffer major modifications.
• We apologized for this mistake regarding the citation of Tables, Figures and References. The error has been fixed.

Reviewer 2 Report

Author Response

We apologized for this mistake regarding the citation of Tables, Figures and References. The error has been fixed.

Reviewer 3 Report

There is one major problem with the manuscript that I hope is just a technical issues with the downloaded version. All of the citations, figure numbers and table number appear as [?]. For the figures and the tables it is relatively easy to determine which the authors are referencing but not at all easy to replace the [?] with the appropriate citation. I highlighted these issues in the attached. I was also not clear why the authors used LS for latitudes in line 29 and Figure legend 1 rather than S.

The writing is clear and the topic is interesting and important due to value of the fishery. There should be some editing to make the English flow more smoothly but this can be done by the editor.

I advise acceptance after these problems are corrected.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

• We apologized for this mistake regarding the citation of Tables, Figures and References. The error has been fixed.
• We have standardized the abbreviation to keep consistency across the paper. We changed LS to the letter S to denote ‘South’.
• The reviewer attached a revised version of the manuscript signaling several corrections of the English.  All the changes suggested are included in the new version of the manuscript.
• We also modified lines 105 to 198 in the old version of the manuscript, Discussion section. Through the changes, we accounted for lack of clarity that R3 commented in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf