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The paper is ready for publication.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Nigel Andrew, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Dear authors, I welcome you to re-submit your manuscript after addressing some minor comments.
no comment
No comment
no comment
some minor comments - typos and formatting for refs needs checking
see attached file
I hope the authors will consider revising the manuscript and providing a point-to-point rebuttal when resubmitting.
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The Introduction and Discussion still need a lot of work- as long convoluted sentances - have highlighted where major rewrites are required
and references are not in a consistent format
some of the authors are fluent in English they need to carefully check the final manuscript
no comment
they just to better present their conclusions- and restrict themselves to their findings - and the Intro needs a major reorganisatiom have no problems with their descriptions of species -
please see my comments on the attached manuscript
major rewrite of Intro and Discussion needed and the format of the refs not consistent
The manuscript interestingly described the last remaining unresolved cosmopolitan species of the genus Marphysa in South Africa. I agree with the points/concerns made by the reviewers and would like to draw the author's attention to address the suggestions raised in the two annotated pdf uploaded by both reviewers. I look forward to receiving the revised manuscript soon.
Article is well generally well written have made some suggestions throughout
not that relevant to this study
2 new species are well described
some carefully editing re punctuation is required have marked on the manuscript
The manuscript requires revision in nearly all concepts targeted in this section, except for being self-contained and include relevant results (i.e., english style, literature references, figures and tables require revision). However, the list of suggestions and comments is too long to be here detailed. All them can be found in the attached revised manuscript.
Do not apply.
The results of this manuscript contain very interesting information on the species of Marphysa and related genus in southern Africa, which include the description of two new species from the region, leading to having a fauna with indigenous species instead of worldwide cosmopolitan taxa, as previously stated. The findings are well supportted both in terms of morphological and molecular data, and I have no concerns on the validity of the newly described species. So, I strongly recommend to publish this manuscript, but not before without writing an accuratly revised new version.
An additional concern, besides all comments and sugestions included in the attached manuscript, is that there are many concepts repeated in slightly different forms in defferent sections of the manuscript. I strongly recommend the authors to critically review my sugestions/comments, but also to read carefully the new version they will produce trying to avoid these repeated parts of the text. I also recommend them to check for consistency all along the manuscript, and to check if the use of abbreviations is or not necessary. In case of being considered as necessary, these have to be explained in the text, preferably in the methods section. I also strongly recomment them to try to improve the quality of their photos and, particularly in the case of the pectinate chaetae, if they do not have better photos, to provide drawings of all types for all species they are describing, which will be very useful for future readers.
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