Sampling Procedure for Establishing Criteria for Sea Urchin (Loxechinus albus) Proportion under the Legal Minimum Length of landings

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

L14 Species name in italics

L17 As “a” quality control measure

L21 is this specimens below 6.5cm in diameter? Clunky sentence

L22 Word “decision” not necessary

L30 more keywords would be helpful

L34 How big are these marine fields? More specifics on area. Do you mean populations of sea urchins in a given area?

L35 Numbering of references needs to be sorted into a logical order. This will relate to all references in the entire article

L36 is this an average of 18,077 tons per year?

Figure 1. Wording needs to be moved as these cannot be read properly in places

L41 Studies by… (author name required here, not just reference). Multiple times throughout (e.g. L66)

L45 needs to be reworded

L47 why decimal point after 7 and not 6?

L49-51 Tense is wrong here and needs rewording

L73 What does RQL stand for?

L74 you mean the producer “is” the diver or owner, not corresponds to

Figure 2. Unclear what all the dashed lines are. Acceptable spelt with two c’s and this is in a different font – change

L93 that allows the assessment of…

L109 paragraph spacing required

L109 Which approach? The one detailed above? This is unclear

L119 What has happened with the line numbering here?

Figure 3. number of trays or boxes? The index is poorly explained here

L126 Which watchdog?

L129 why not larger than 60 tons?

L133 … because it remains below an RQL of 15

Tables 1 and 2 It would be worthwhile to see where this optimisation has occurred. Difficult to see otherwise

Figure 4 should be bigger – hard to see data. The boxplots on top are not properly described

Table 4 Wording in Left hand column needs rewording especially Conformity and Non-conformity

L164 either stick to cm or mm throughout article

Figure 5. do you need to specify that 65 mm = 6.5 cm??

Figure 6. Black dots are outliers? Why do you specific Melinka “location” and not Quellon “location”?

Author Response

We would like acknowledge this careful revision of our manuscript jmse-697370: "Sampling procedure for estimating the proportion of sea urchin (Loxechinus albus) under the legal minimum length of landings". We also thank the reviewer for all their valuable comments and constructive criticism. We have included (see attached file below), a detailed point-by-point response to all the reviewer's comments and suggestions. The comments from the reviewer are listed in cursive italic letters, and updated lines appear in red in the manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The MS describes a statistical procedure to quickly check whether landings of a specific sea urchin conform with official regulations. The basic idea is interesting, although simplistic, but there are some doubts on its general applicability. Therefore I am suggesting a major revision of the MS so that the authors could explicitly provide supporting data on their idea (other than statistical procedures).

More specifically:

The title must be better define the scope of the MS,   

The introduction suffers from a lack of general interest,

What is the point of presenting Figure 1?,

I would like to see some details on L. albus fisheries, as well as of the status of its natural stocks,

What is meant with "selective" fishing pressure?,

What is meant with an "acceptance" sampling plan?

Why data from the three ports are differently treated? this has to be explained in the introduction,

The entire methodology section is hard to follow for any reader, a schematic presentation of the performed steps toward the goal of procedure would be very helpful,

Boxes weight is the only measured parameter, but the results of the statistical procedure are highly influenced by the size structure of natural stocks; so, this approach could lead to severe bias especially when natural stocks are intensively fished,

If I understood well, additional field data are required to document the practical utility of  the proposed procedure, as it is applicable only when the size distribution of natural stocks is homogenous; so it should be always combined with other fisheries data.

I also have some reservations on the wider applicability of the procedure, as different results are produced even within this local and restricted fishing area.

Finally, the weight of sea urchins is highly influenced by seasonality, gonadal development and reproductive status, feeding differences, and other environmental factors. How these are incorporated on the proposed procedure?   

Author Response

We would like acknowledge this careful revision of our manuscript jmse-697370: "Sampling procedure for estimating the proportion of sea urchin (Loxechinus albus) under the legal minimum length of landings". We also thank the reviewer for all their valuable comments and constructive criticism. We have included (see attached file below), a detailed point-by-point response to all the reviewer's comments and suggestions. The comments from the reviewer are listed in cursive italic letters, and updated lines appear in red in the manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In this paper, the authors proposed a statistical framework for managing the commercial fishery of Loxechinus albus along northeast of Chilean Patagonia.

The paper is in general well written and brings relevant information to sustainable catch and conservation of this important biological resource based on local context and practices. I have a question that should be answered before the manuscript acceptance though.

At lines 109-111 the authors state that "Because of the height-weight relationship, it is logical to assume a box with small urchins will have a different weight than a box with larger specimens."

But later on in the manuscript (line 196) they said that the height-weight relationship is not necessarily linear, and older urchins can be larger but lighter. But is not clear to me if different size classes can present similar weight and how this could or could not affect the predictions presented here.     

Author Response

We would like acknowledge this careful revision of our manuscript jmse-697370: "Sampling procedure for estimating the proportion of sea urchin (Loxechinus albus) under the legal minimum length of landings". We also thank the reviewer for all their valuable comments and constructive criticism. We have included (see attached file below), a detailed point-by-point response to all the reviewer's comments and suggestions. The comments from the reviewer are listed in cursive italic letters, and updated lines appear in red in the manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

This revised version of the MS has been significantly improved and I am overall, pleased by the authors' response to my previous comments. 

I am just suggesting to the authors to carefully read again their manuscript to correct possible misunderstandings such as for example in line 230 of the discussion " the proposed approach could lead to severe bias" so they could add something like when size structures of urchins are highly shifted or a size structure analysis should be performed to ensure the validity of the proposed method in future applications  

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

We would like acknowledge this careful revision of our manuscript jmse-697370: "Sampling procedure for establishing criterion for sea urchin (Loxechinus albus) proportion under the legal minimum length of landings". We are grateful that this manuscript can be considered for publication after minor revision. We also thank the reviewer for all their valuable comments and constructive criticism. We have included (see below), a detailed point-by-point response to all the reviewer's comments and suggestions. The comments from the reviewer are listed in cursive italic letters, and updated lines appear in red in the manuscript.

Reviewer comments:

This revised version of the MS has been significantly improved and I am overall, pleased by the authors' response to my previous comments.

R: Thanks for your comments and suggestion. These help us to improve significantly the original version.

I am just suggesting to the authors to carefully read again their manuscript to correct possible misunderstandings such as for example in line 230 of the discussion " the proposed approach could lead to severe bias" so they could add something like when size structures of urchins are highly shifted or a size structure analysis should be performed to ensure the validity of the proposed method in future applications.

R: We considered your comment in Discussion section. First we rephrase some sentences and then include some extra lines according to possible problems produces by size structure in other applications.