The Morphological Differentiation and Evolutionary Origins of Artemia in China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsFig. 1 is absent from the manuscript. please insert it and add also a caption/legend to clarify sites names and relative acronims.
Terminology needs homogenization (e.g. tail and abdomen are used as synonims; asexual and parthenogenetic, also. please use always the same term)
only one addition is proposed for references list.
all my suggestions stay on the pdf file of the manuscript
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
probably a small intervention is necessary for a check of the English language. In any case, I tried to suggest small changes directly on the manuscript
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
We feel great thanks for your professional review work on our article. The point by point response to your comments is listed in the pdf file. Please see the attachment. We hope the correction will meet with approval.
Sincerely,
Daochuan Zhang
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe paper deals with morphological and molecular differenciation between Artemia species present in China. Morphological analyses concentrate around differences between A. sinica and A. franciscana, which is nothing new, really. Molecular data come from much more species and constitute a good dataset, but most of the relations described here have already been described. Some of the statistical analyses f morphological data have serious flaws (see below).
l.71: did you mean between bisexual and sexual populations?
l 106-109: how he animals were fixed after removing from population? It is very important when one analyses morphology in Anostraca.
Table S2: Accuracy of each population assigned to a specific group at species level - it is not the acuracy of population but acuracy of assignment
187-201: provide test statistics for DCA (eigenvalues of axes/functions)
Table 2: Morphometric characters for the fourteen populations of Artemia from China (Mean±Sd) - are these female populatuions?
187-232: you had four species of Artemia but use only three of them for morphological analysis - what happened to A. tibetiana? I assume it didn't hutch but you should state it clearly, so the reader doesn't lose their time to figure it out
128-132: please, state what correction for multiple comparisons/post hoc test did you use
211-218:both, anova and Kruskal-Wallis are designed for comparisons between groups equaling in numbers or at least close to equal. In your case you have n=16 in case of HF population and you compare it with n=148 (?) sample of A.sinica - these numbers are extremly far from being equal and I'm affraid you can't trust your results. There are statistical methods that will help you to deal with unbalanced sampling design - you have to use one of them. If you already did it - please, state it clearly in the Methods section. The same goes for S7-S8, l. 213-220. By the way, each time when ilustrating an analysis or writing about it please, state what are the n values.
246-248: "The Eastern Asia Lineage constituted two well-defined clades" - I can see 5 clades within this lineage on Fig 5
Fig. 6 is too small - especialy the map, one can not read the letters
486-505; 510-511: speculative
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageEnglish needs a careful check by a native speaker - there is a number of gramma and semantic errors.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
We feel great thanks for your professional review work on our article. The point by point response to your comments is listed in the pdf file. Please see the attachment. We hope the correction will meet with approval.
Sincerely,
Daochuan Zhang
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
