Head Shape Heritability in the Hungarian Meadow Viper Vipera ursinii rakosiensis
, Bálint Halpern 2,3,4,5, Fernando MartÃnez-FreirÃa 6,7 and Antigoni Kaliontzopoulou 8,9,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors and colleagues,
I have much appreciated the reading of this ms of yours. I found the whole ms well done, robust analyses and well prepared figures.
Personally, no problem at all in accepting this ms as it stands. I have only positively commented a few times thoroughout the ms.
Best regards.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you very much for your review. We are pleased that you found the work so interesting and well done.
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper "Head Shape Heritability in the Hungarian Meadow Viper Vipera ursinii rakosiensis" is a straightforward, well thought-out and well executed study. The authors had a rare opportunity to study a heritability of head shape in the Hungarian meadow viper from the captive breeding and reintroduction program. The dataset is sufficient for this kind of study. M&M section is easy to follow and understand. The authors employed methods of geometric morphometrics, using both landmarks and semilandmarks, which is optimal for a dorsal projection of snake's head. Results are well-presented and discussed. Apart from some minor comments, provided in the annotated .pdf file, my opinion on this article is that it provides a substantial contribution to the knowledge of the rare and endangered snake species, and it should be accepted in Animals after a minor revision.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for her/his revision. Below, we provide the responses to the reviewer's comments, signalled in relation to the lines in the manuscript:
Line 17 - This is the first mention to animals in the manuscript, so we prefer to keep it.
Lines 92-95- We have incorporated the suggestion made by the reviewer.
Line 109 – Thank you for this comment; the subtle scalation changes mentioned in the referred study are not expected to influence our study.
Lines 119-120: We have rephrased this sentence to accommodate the reviewer's comment.
Line 287 – We deleted “charismatic”.
Lines 334-335 – We appreciate this comment. In this text we provide two examples of how increasing the size of the eye area could benefit the species based on published evidence. There could be other examples, however we could not find support for the case reported by the reviewer.
Line 371 - modified
