Functional and Taxonomic Overlap in Shore Fish Assemblages in a Tropical Seascape
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript documents the presence and absence of a significant number of species in three different habitat types with the shear volume of detections providing useful insight into the composition of fish assemblages in this region. The text is well written and care is taken to clearly define the many terms presented. Some relatively minor improvements will significantly boost the quality of the manuscript and I have indicated these in the annotated pdf here.
My points:
- It is very difficult to align results with data in Table 1 and this is either due to errors in the text or Table or insufficient clarity around content of the table and how this differs to what is reported in the text.
- The quality of Figures should be improved. Consistent formatting across Figures is needed in fonts, colour schemes, decimals etc.
- The addition of a comprehesive species list would be a valuable asset to other fish ecologists wishing to know if particular species have been observed in this region before. Suggest some supp data be included that lists observations of all species for each habitat. There are always ethical questions about the value of using destructive sampling methodologies and whether their use provides sufficient science value. Another reason to include this comprehensive species list.
- I could only upload one file here, and I did also edit the supps - these need some big formatting fixes and attention to detail. In particular the legends for each Table need rewriting for clarity, there is a spelling error in SFig1 ('eef')
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
see attached pdf file
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript “Functional and taxonomic overlap in shore fish assemblages in 2 a reef environment” presents a very robust data on fish community at reefs, mangroves, and soft bottoms sites. The authors send a very well written manuscript, with good results and discussion. I did have some suggestions and questions that hopefully will help improve the manuscript.
General comment:
Your introduction could be re structure to present the data with a more concise flow of thoughts. The information there was all right, but the way it was presented is a little messy. Check my comment there for more details.
At first, I had a major concern about the use of rotenone. But after questioning, you sent a very complete and convincing answer that helped me understand what actually happened. Because of that, I do suggest that you add as much explanation as possible in the methods, to avoid further concerns like mine. Just be as detailed as possible on dates of collection (for all the fish), dates, specific regulations by the time they were used. I did feel like some important information was missing in the Methods section, so I left specific comments here (attached pdf).
As for the results, I do suggest a different way to present the data to became more visually appealing, and some more advanced statistic to extract the best information possible out of your very robust data.
Suggestions:
- Most of the Results section text could be summarized using VennDiagrams. Consider using the to make it easier to visualize the data and also make your text shorter and more direct.
- Did the authors considered using more applied statistics to analyze data? Such as diversity index, or even a multivariate analysis to see relationship between life traits. sites and species? This could help validate some discussions, as well as show different patterns for fish assemblages.
Discussion could be complemented with the results of suggested statistical analysis.
The supplementary material came in a unfinished version, with Microsoft word revisions, and many minor errors in the figures. Please double check the whole material and send the final version.
Specific comments were made in the attached pdf.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
please see attached pdf file
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors satisfactorily made all changes according to our suggestions, and made sure to well-explain the ones they decide to decline. Overall, the changes improved an already good manuscript, and I appreciate the time and effort to answer our questions.
I still have a couple comments on this new version, although they are minor, and related to figures.
Figures - Legends are getting out of the page border. Double check all figures format in the final version. Some Figures titles are not centralized.
Since you changed to colored figures, make sure the colors are color-blind friendly, specially in the VennDiagrams. I myself found it hard to look at the bright green.
Author Response
Dear colleague,
We are glad that the revised version answered your comments and those of the other referee. We followed your last suggestions:
1- colors on figures were changed (in the main text and the supplemental) to take into account potential problems for color blind readers, green was changed to black and red lines were changed to dotted red lines
2- the Venn diagrams were also changed : green is now grey and a dark contour was drawn around the circles representing mangroves
3- on the map light green was changed to a much darker green so it could be distinguished from red by color blind persons
4- we changed several margins in order to better fit the figures and tables, however we think that a final formatting of the text will be done by the editorial office
Regards,
Michel Kulbicki and Laurent Wantiez
