Assessment of Four Major Fish Species Stocks in the Lithuanian and Russian Parts of Curonian Lagoon (SE Baltic Sea) Using CMSY Method
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
See track changes in attached file.
This paper should be shortened and not deal with too many issues beyond the the assessment of the 4 species. Right now, the main findings are lost in an avalanche of unrelated issues.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions. We have accepted all your corrections put directly in the text of the manuscript including the title of the paper, please check the final manuscript edition.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript mainly uses the CMSY method (to be precise, the CMSY_2019_9f.R script) to assess the current status of four commercial fish species resources in the Curonian Lagoon area. My main criticism of the manuscript is its lack of novelty. Although the research method is new to be used in 4 main commercial fish species, the codes are indeed open source. The authors also delete a large part, the BSM part, without making any improvements to them. In the discussion, it is suggested to use CMSY in combination with other methods. Why not add the BSM part in your research? It may not be difficult to obtain CPUE data for the four commercial fish species.
Quite a lot of content is discussed for the limitations of the CMSY method itself (L374-433) in the Discussion section. It may deviate from the direction of your research. The authors should focus on discussing the results (related figures, tables). On this point, please refer to the discussion in [38]. In addition, the large amount of discussion about the mesh size of fishing nets does not seem to be very much related to this study (L459-479).
L44: Please cite the literature that has taken relevant measures to rebuild resources.
L90: “are important”
L102-120: Need to be streamlined. Here use so much content in [19] to cite.
L133-173: The content is good, but large part of background information of the Curonian lagoon should move to the Introduction part. Here, materials and methods part should focus on why select 4 main commercial species in this study.
L209: The left side of equation (1) should be Bt+1
L224: In equation (4) & (5), are the coefficients universal, and if so, how accurate is it? Or it needs to be different depending on the characteristics of the research area. How to determine this coefficient in this study. The same question exists with the thresholds in Table 3, which is the same as in [30].
L271: In Figure 4, keep the axis labels consistent (Figure 5. ‘Stock status-B/Bmsy’, also), and the k value of freshwater of bream is much larger than the other three. Please give a corresponding explanation.
L319-329: For the description logic and hierarchical structure, please finish the description of the phenomenon revealed by color block first, and then describe the performance of the four fish species.
L367-368: Why are there only two fishes in Table 7, and the results of the other two?
L382-383: Is it a limitation of the CMSY method itself, or is it difficult to obtain relevant data?
L499-501: In hypothesis Test, if we conclude 'do not reject ', this does not necessarily mean that the null hypothesis is true, it only suggests that there is not sufficient evidence against in favour of ; rejecting the null hypothesis then, suggests that the alternative hypothesis may be true. Good or not need more evidence to prove.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions, which we have tried to take into account when improving the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript of Vaidotas Andrašūnas and colleagues focus on a very important topic for fishery management and environmental sustainability. The manuscript is well written and organized and is in some parts written in an even too accurate way, almost like a review article, for the amount of historical data and connections reported. This, while weighing down the fluency of the document, nevertheless provides a large amount of information related to the area of study and species treated, which will certainly be useful in the future to other researchers.
I also greatly appreciated the review of the various models that can be used today to conduct these studies, and as the authors also highlighted the limits of what they chose for the experimental part of their study, a feature that makes this scientific contribution even more valuable.
Despite I found the manuscript very interesting and worthy of publication in Fishes Journal, there are some minor points to address before the end of editorial process, that I summarize as follow.
Please review the entire manuscript carefully to avoid minor errors and grammatical oversights such as:
Line 44: seasonal
Line 49: higher crustaceans (what is referred to as higher?)
Line 90: are important
189: this study
and more, please double check the entire manuscript for these.
Figure 2 is not clear in the present form. Please convert it to color style, or change the graph type to better expose your data.
Results material such as Table 7 and Figure 6 should not be included in the discussion section, but, at least, in a separate section of Results. In Discussion section you must exclusively discuss that data, referring to those results, as indeed you did.
Best regards
The Reviewer
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions. However, some text of the manuscript you have regarded as interesting and valuable was removed according to the suggestions of other reviewers. Hopefully, that didn‘t affect the overall value of the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Glad to see that the authors followed the advice to improve their title and drop superfluous considerations, both of which makes their paper more readable.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your review.
Reviewer 2 Report
Although the method used in this study lacks novelty, the overall work still has a certain meaning. Here, I would like to point out that many indicators can be used to measure CPUE, not limited to the fishing gear types per se. After the last revision, most of the content is quite substantial, but the following points still need to be improved.
L270-282: “At this step…The next step…In this step…” The hierarchy of these steps is a bit messy. Please reorganize these transition words.
L 278-279: These two lines should be placed forward. Obviously, the content in Table 5 has been quoted starting from line 272.
L299: Is this sentence appropriate as a paragraph alone? Please merge down.
L300: In Figure 5, subplots of Pike-perch and European perch in “Catch” and “Exploitation”, please keep the y-axis scale of the corresponding subplots consistent (to be precise, keep the respective 0.4 and 2.0 at the same height).
Line 308-309: Please confirm whether this statement” still healthy stock size” is accurate.
Line 394: If there are no special circumstances, please keep the tenses in the paragraph consistent.
Line 414-415: Please add references.
Line 426: “allow” should be changed to “allows”.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions. We have accepted all your corrections.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
