Effects of Descendent Phenotypic Diversity Mediated by Ancestor Environmental Variation on Population Productivity of a Clonal Plant

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors presented an interesting study with the aim to elucidate the effect of parental environmental differences on offspring productivity. Parental Duckweed were grown under different nutrient concentrations in experiment one and three different environmental factors in experiment two. Offspring populations containing different combinations of phenotypes were created and their growth were monitored under different environments. The results suggested that the only factor effecting offspring productive is nutrient availability rather than offspring phenotypic diversity mediated by environmental variations.

I think the authors have good experimental design, appropriate statistic analysis, and solid conclusion based on the evidence presented in the manuscript. 

 

I have a few minor suggestions:

 

Line 48-55. Are these hypotheses proposed by the authors or statements from the literature? Please be more clear or add references.

 

Line 52-53. Change to ‘however, if the phenotypic differences cased by environmental variations were not significant/ large enough…’ might be better.

 

Line 56-63. Please add some more recent studies such as: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2022.728167

 

Line 70. Please elaborate ‘performance’

 

Line 71. Does ‘it’ stand for ‘offspring’? Please be more clear.

 

Line 75-85. I don’t think all that details on duckweed is necessary. Please only keep contents that are directly related to the experimental design. 

 

Experiment 1 & 2. Maybe make supplemental figures to illustrate the experimental designs? It will help readers understand the process more easily. 

 

Experiment 1 & 2. Descriptions of the same design can be simplified. For example, ‘Ramets were grown in pots (17.5 cm in diameter and 10.5 cm in height) containing 1.2 L Hoagland solution’ can be simplified to ‘Ramets were grown under the same setting as described above/ before/ in the previous section’. 

 

I’d be curious to know how each phenotype behaved under new environment. Does the small ramets remained small in all the phenotype combinations? Or the small ones grow as big as the others in nutrient rich environments. Since the authors only presented the summary of all plants in the same number-phenotype mixture, this valuable information is lost. I hope the authors can add this information if they have it, for example, in experiment one, does the 1/32 + 1/2 Hoagland 2-phenotype mixture have smaller remets than the 1/32 + 1 Hoagland 2-phenotype mixture?

 

One additional potential follow up work could be extend the growth time for the parental plants since some epigenetic changes might take generations to occur or stabilize. I.e. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2022.728167

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In this manuscript (diversity-1800830) entitled "Effects of descendent phenotypic diversity mediated by ancestor environmental variation on population productivity of a clonal plant" submitted to Diversity, Yu Jin and colleagues have assessed effects of phenotypic diversity induced by parental environmental variation on productivity in Spirodela polyrhiza. Authors grew ancestor ramets of S. polyrhiza under different environmental conditions to obtain descendent ramets with different phenotypes, and then construct descendent populations to examine the effect of phenotypic diversity on population productivity. Authors found that environmental variation had significant effects on descendent populations but no effects on their total biomass or number of ramets in S. polyrhiza. Although these results failed to support the idea that phenotypic diversity induced by ancestor environment variation can influence descendent population productivity, authors proposed that this model needs to be tested with more species in different ecosystems. This study is an interesting work, I have however several concerns that may be addressed to improve the quality of the work.

1. I found the writing poor in some sections and, thus, the manuscript may benefit from the use of a professional editor.

2. Results were poorly described. For instance, design of experiment 1 and 2 should be introduced in the section of Results.

3. For Figure 2 and 3, significance testing should be performed and labeled.

4. Please avoid convoluted sentences like the ones listed below and try to split them into two sentences:

-P1. line 35-38,

-P2, line 44-47, 48-52.

-P8, line 260-266.

-P9, lines 295-301.

5. Please double-check the reference list. For instance, abbreviations of ‘Funct. Ecol.’, ‘Ecol. Lett.’ and the full names of ‘Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences’, ‘Ecological Monographs’, ‘Evolution Systematics’ were used simultaneously.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors have addressed my concerns in the revised version in a satisfactory way.