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I now confirm you have addressed the reviewer's comments and your manuscript is ready for publication.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Xavier Pochon, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Your manuscript has been reviewed by three referees and they recommend some minor changes to be incorporated. Please do so, and re-submit.
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This manuscript meets the basic reporting requirements. Minor comments can be found in the annotated PDF.
This manuscript meets the experimental design requirements in general. However, some precisions need to be added to the methods section
This manuscript meets the validity of the findings requirements, relevant data have been provided. However, some suggestions about the presentation of the results are made and full statistical results should be stated. Conclusions are correctly linked to the original research question, some suggestions can be seen in the PDF.
This research has been well undertaken, with great efforts made to characterise the benthic and fish communities of Grand Cayman. However, some precisions in the methods and results section need to be added.
The language overall is clear and professional. That said, I have found a number of small changes that would improve the clarity and flow. I have listed these below in General Comments.
I do think there are places, particularly within the Discussion and Conclusion where there could be a stronger connection between MCEs and broader elements of ecological theory. For example, one major result is substantial variation in community structure among sites, however it is unclear whether this should be expected or not. Are mesophotic communities expected to be more or less homogenous than shallow reefs? I think the paper could benefit from some broader discussion regarding our limited understanding of the competing hypotheses and processes shaping diversity and community structure across depth.
No comment. Validity of the findings meets standards in all regard.
The study in question investigates the community structure of benthic and fish communities on the MCEs of Grand Cayman, which have received less attention in published research. Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems overall are understudied, and while making for a study more exploratory in nature, establishing this baseline information for these lesser understood communities is a critical research need. This makes the paper a great fit for PeerJ. Overall, the paper is structured clearly and was easy to read, and I'd like to commend the authors on their work in and out of the water. As above, I do think the discussion could be expanded slightly to ground the results in the broader literature. However, beyond that, I do not have any major concerns regarding the structure or presentation of the study, and only present a series of minor comments below, which should further improve the clarity of the manuscript.
L104 - I think "composed of alternating hard-bottom or sandy substrates", might be a bit clearer for the reader.
L107 - It would be good to call these 'belt transects' the first time they are mentioned.
L129 - I understand that time lapse was the setting used, but since a time lapse it usually a stationary thing, it can be confusing without the necessary context of the goal (spatial coverage). I'd suggest something like "to map the reef surface, divers swam in a lawnmower pattern, taking photos periodically using the time lapse setting"
L134 - Should this be "a 2d orthomosaic"?
L138 - Change to "genera".
L143 - What was the resolution of visual assessments (e.g. to the nearsest 5% cover)? Mention this if possible.
L154 - Fish diversity and coral diversity both are referred to on line 151, but then here "fish coral diversity" is mentioned, is this a mistake?
L157 - This should be "Tukey's Test".
L180 - Change this to "was not enough".
L186 - Here's it called "Shannon-Weiner" but elsewhere in the paper it's "Shannon-Weaver". I'll be honeset, I've heard both used before, but never thought to look it up til now. It seems that "Shannon Index" is the best name, as Shannon developed it independently, prior to including in the book with Weaver cited. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1466-822X.2003.00015.x
L204 - I'd change this to "but only accounted for", to match L206.
L309 - Check the font, here and throughout.
Fig 4 - While this figure has a lot of cool species-level info in the bottom half, it's a bit hard to read, so you might be better off just having 5x4 matrices for the five trophic groups against the 4 sites.
Supplementary 1 - Doesn't seem to be anything here, is something missing here, or was this automatically generated?
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