Reply to Hendawitharana et al. Comment on “Arulananthan et al. The Status of the Coral Reefs of the Jaffna Peninsula (Northern Sri Lanka), with 36 Coral Species New to Sri Lanka Confirmed by DNA Bar-Coding. Oceans 2021, 2, 509–529”

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript is a reply to Hendawitharana et al. comment on the published work by Arulananthan et al. 2021 in Oceans. 

In general, the replies to Hendawitharana et al.'s comments are weak from my point of view. These arguments fail to provide compelling evidence to support them and consequently, fail to convince the readership that the authors' previously published work in 2021 renders solid results. 

Through lines 23-25, the authors acknowledge to that their molecular approach and by extension, their identification methods are flawed, but they still argue that their species identifications are sound. I respectfully disagree. The arguments based on morphological approaches as well as the fact that they only used molecular methods to check on some doubtful "speies" (sic), denotes disregard on current advances, not only in coral systematics but in general systematics.

Perhaps for preliminary surveys, pilot inventories and whenever the collection of voucher samples is challenging, the identification by video or photography might be acceptable to provide a general landscape of the potential occurrence of certain taxa, but all these with cautionary notes. However, for taxa where the species identification is challenging, any method that is not complemented with suitable molecular methods properly designed for species identification including intraspecific variation and outgroups will not be enough to make any claims of new occurrences or new species.

The authors state that since they found no published records of genetic methods to identify coral species in Sri Lanka, they considered their published work as a pilot study. First, I find this a poor argument to justify the use of an unsuitable method for species identification. And second, if the authors consider their work as a pilot study, it should be clearly stated as such and even reflected from the title to avoid misleading of the readership with claims of new records. 

I was particularly drawn by another argument  in lines 89-92, where the authors reject the blind acceptance of results of DNA-based studies. While I agree that all the scientific results should always be carefully scrutinised, I think that in this case, the argument only reflects a lack of knowledge of the capabilities and experimental designs when using DNA techniques for species identification. 

I praised the authors statement in lines 106-109, where they acknowledge their methodological flaws. However, in my opinion, the authors should avoid defending their results for the sake of standing up for their published work. Science is about advancing knowledge and perhaps the authors should take the opportunity to rectify and highlight the value of their work. I think that is of extreme importance to explore taxa and geographic areas not previously studied and also to highlight the potential of new species records, even as a mere possibility, despite the methodological limitations. By acknowledging these, it may have a more positive effect, raising awareness of the potential importance of the area and proposing further work with improved approaches to properly corroborate previous preliminary findings. 

I think that the authors need to reshape completely their reply. The species identification methods used don't match the purpose or support the conclusions of the previous study and they should acknowledge this trying to highlight the challenges on doing detailed inventories of species occurrences and also in which instances their approaches might be useful and in which way their results could be insightful, always avoiding unsupported claims. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

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I found some few typos, e.g. in Table 2 "Acrop01ora". Please revise the text once more. 

Author Response

Reviewer 2 comment:

I found some few typos, e.g. in Table 2 "Acrop01ora". Please revise the text once more.

Response by authors:

As suggested, we have carefully checked the reply to ensure there are no typos or grammar/punctuation errors.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I agree with the changes in the manuscript and I am satisfied with the responses provided by the authors. 

I spotted one typo in L. 86. "...Hendawitharana et al. (2023) found our tile misleading...". "tile" must be replaced by "title".

Author Response

The minor revision recommended by reviewer 2 has been done, and we have acknowledged their valuable time and comments. Please find the revised response to Henadwihthana's comments in accordance with the reviewer's feedback, as shown in the track changes file. You can find the cleaned revised file attached separately.

Please feel free to reach out if you need any further information or clarification.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf