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Dear Dr. Diaz-Ricaurte and Dr. Santana, I congratulate you on the acceptance of this article for publication. I believe that the conservation and study of amphibian diversity is one of the most important areas of nature conservation. I hope that you will continue your research and send more informative and high-quality articles to our journal.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jennifer Vonk, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
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I acknowledge that the authors have put a lot of efforts into improvement of their paper. I feel my concerns and commenrts have been adequately addressed. In my view, the paper is fine now. Good job.
Dear Dr. Diaz-Ricaurte and Dr. Santana, I ask you to carefully consider the reviewers' comments before your article is accepted for publication. It is important that you justify each change in the manuscript, especially if you have not completely corrected the deficiencies pointed out by the reviewer.
**PeerJ Staff Note**: Please ensure that all review, editorial, and staff comments are addressed in a response letter and that any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate.
**Language Note**: The review process has identified that the English language and grammar must be improved. PeerJ can provide language editing services - please contact us at [email protected] for pricing (be sure to provide your manuscript number and title). Alternatively, you should make your own arrangements to improve the language quality and provide details in your response letter. – PeerJ Staff
The text is well written and meet all criteria to publication. Please just double check some word spelling as in:
Line 222 – ‘naturals’ should be corrected to ‘natural’.
The experimental design is well conducted and meet all criteria to publication.
The article has all it data provided openly and is replicable. The conclusions are well stated.
The authors have carefully reviewed the manuscript according to the reviewers comments. I consider that the article as it is now meet all criteria to be published and thus should be accepted.
I enyojed reviewing the manuscript "Redescription of the Poison Dart Frog Ameerega ingeri (Anura: Dendrobatidae): external morphology, tadpoles, natural history, distribution, advertisement call, phylogenetic and conservation" which contributes highly detailed and valuable information on a particularly understudied emblematic poison frog. I have not seen previous versions of the manuscript but based my review directly on what apears to be a revised version.
I have not revised formatting because journals with publication fees as high as in the case of PeerJ should be able to cover this service throught their copyediting process in my opinion.
I have identified the following major conserns remaining after the authors first revision:
Comments on methods see below.
Diagnosis: The comparison with other species is not well structured. I´d start with saying what are the most similar species (considering distribution and morphology). Provide detailed species-wise comparisons for those. Then to distinguish from all others. Do not say it differs from some species such as because that sounds incomplete and inaccessible. Consider adding tadpole traits to the differentiation where data is available.
For your redescription, please make clearer on which material your accounts are based. It concerns me that you did not really examine type material (photo of holotype only??, what about paratypes). A formal redescription should be based on type or at least topotypic material. Other material can be used to describe variation. This is not what was done here. Given that we don´t know (molecular) diversity within what you consider "ingeri", I would be very careful with such. At least make this strong limitation of your work very clear.
Phylogeny: The fig in the manuscript and supplement appear very distinct. How? A major concern is that you only include colombian material in your tree. Then what is the value of your entire molecular section, given that Guillory et al. have done so already with a much better dataset than your 16S alignment? Why not including various localities incl. Ecuadorian material? Otherwise your phylohenetic section has no additional value to the existing literature? Also, A. bilinguis comes out non-monophyletic in your set. Basically all other ameeregas are nested within bilinguis in your supp. tree. This is something at least to be discussed!
How do you know your tadpole series belongs to ingeri and not another sympatric ameerega/dendrobatid? Did you barcode it?
I do not understand very well based on which data the authors assign ecuadorian material to ingeri
I disagree with proposing EN as conservation status. The criteria B is not to be used with AOO for species where the distribution is incompletely assessed. Your EOO is actually quite large for Neotropical frogs. The small AOO is most likely result of inclomplete sampling! In addition, you consider populations stable above and I would expect this species to cope with some habitat alteration. Please consult someone from the IUCN redlist team to review this section but This species rather appears like LC or NT to me.
Figure and Table captions require thorough rewriting as the english is so erroneous in several cases that they are incomprehendible. Aso, the number of Figs. is excessive and most pictures could easily be moved to the Supplement.
And somewhat minor comments (a non-exhaustive list of grammar and spelling corrections; the manuscript is still full of small errors and requires a thorough check by the authors. In times of tools like DeepL and ChatGPT there should be no problem with writing in decent english no matter if native speakers are among an author team):
Title: phylogenetic and conservation reads odd, rather phylogenetic position and ... or phylogenetics and conservation
line 165 onwards: Giving such a descriptive section on the species in the introduction is a bit odd, I´d keep it shorter.
line 186 remove "redescriptive", this might be rather called we "revisit" or "reassess"
line 223: with a diurnal ... samplings - sampling or remove the a
please rephrase the inglish in "using the method of the free search without restrictions and visual encounters survey with manual capture"
line 287: not sure if Boulenger is a suitable ref. here
line ~290: How did you assess ecaptures? By manual comparison of photos or software-based
line 343: package seewave v. 2.1.8 package - remove one "package"
line 373: land cover type elevation range - add and or comma
line 304: "For the diet analysis, we extractedexamined the stomachs of fivenine specimens, for diet analysis" for diet analysis is doubled
line 314: was determinate: replace with we determined or similar, the english is incorrect here
line 388: 0.4 µl of each primer - this info is useless if you don´t specify molarity etc...
line 390: ref in italics
line 413 onwards: "This analysis was performed on the online ASAP platform (https://bioinfo.mnhn.fr/abi/public/asap/asapweb.html) using a simple distance model to calculate pairwise genetic distances, with all other parameters set to default. We retained the partitioning scheme corresponding to the lowest ASAP score, as recommended by Puillandre et al. (2021). The ASAP delimitation was performed on the online server (https://bioinfo.mnhn.fr/abi/public/asap/asapweb.html) considering a simple distance model to compute the distances between samples, and default parameters." Online server is doubled
line 557 irregular instead of irregulars
line 578: reported
line 588: you mean type locality
"The taking dorsal and ventral photographs demonstrated 100% accuracy during the identification of captured and recaptured individuals, with only record of recaptured with respect to the total number of registered individuals (0.83%). This shows that the populations of A. ingeri in the south department of Caquetá are stable." Please rewrite the english in this section! Also, your assumption on population trend is not well elaborated?! A low recapture rate may also reflect short lifespans, not only large populations. Further, this is not a result but something for the discussion.
The result vs. method section on diet is incongruent. Did you find prey in 4 or 5 stomachs??
Coleoptera and Curculionidae were the least common prey - does Coleoptera exclude curculionidae?? This reads a bit unclear
Conservation status first line - species name in italics
Discussion Taxonomy: Thenar not tenar tubercle
Discussion Diet: "specifically Gnamptogenys and Strumigenys" if you were able to identify your prey n genus level, this information should be presented in the results section already. generally try to avoid repenting results excessivley in your discussion. That way you can keep your paper shorter which rather encourages people to read it full length...
Same section: Why should preying on small beetles be accidental and not reflect a naturally wider prey spectrum
Discussion phylogenetics: "especially in species genus like Ameerega" rephrase as especially in genera like Ameerega. Also, justify/explai this statement.
I wouldn´t call a basal lineage a relictual lineage. It might well diversify and expand in the future again...
Please include bilinguis in your discussion of phylogeny given the supp. mat. tree and it being the most similar species.
Discussion of conservation - "marginal de la Selva' road, which may directly impacts known A. ingeri habitats" species name in italics and remove the may.
Supplement: Please provide the tree as a treefile or nexus or similar format instead of PDF because support values can not be seen at all in your current layout.
the methods section on dietary studies requires thorough rewriting: There are so many grammar mistakes (especially where you talk about the formulas used) that it is very hard to understand what you actually want to say.
The molecular section lacks any infos on DNA extraction (can be very brief but shouldn´t be forgotten)
NA. See above for any specific comments
The ms has a quite excessive amount of figures and I believe some can easily be sourced out in the supplementary material.
Dear authors, I ask you to carefully correct the shortcomings of the manuscript and hope that this will allow the reviewer to approve a new version of this manuscript for publication.
Although the article is very suitable for publication on PeerJ, some sections are confusing, and the grammar should be improved prior to acceptance. The article has a very complete background and is beautifully illustrated. All the data is made available by the authors, except for the GenBank Accession numbers of the new sequences, that should be provided upon acceptance. The sequence methods>results>discussion>conclusion is very well constructed, except for some statistical methods that were not presented, some results that should be better developed and specially the conservation status that is kindly biased.
I explained all the details on the document annexed, with every point that need to be improved described.
The experimental design of the article is very well developed, aside from some corrections that need to be done on the tadpole description and call description.
All details are provided on the document annexed.
The article is of highly relevance, providing many new informations about the species Ameerega ingeri. The redescription of this species is an urge for the Dendrobatidae taxonomy to advance and the comments on the natural history and conservation are important to the knowledge about this group. The authors used all the data adequately and the conclusion is well stated.
Additional comments are on the annexed document.
I’m very glad to review the manuscript #106784 entitled “Revisiting the Poison Dart Frog Ameerega ingeri (Anura: Dendrobatidae): external morphology, tadpoles, natural history, distribution, advertisement call, phylogenetic and conservation”. It’s a very thorough review of the status of the species, adding several essential information and it is from high relevance to the scientific community and for the studies on Dendrobatidae.
I congratulate the authors on their work, and their effort to improve the Dendrobatidae taxonomy.
The manuscript has all the merits to be published on PeerJ, and I deeply encourage its acceptance if the authors correct some major questions. None of my comments will require data recollection, but some will require the authors to go further and describe their results better and also to analyze some data again, so I consider it to be a Major Revision.
If the authors improve the writing and the main questions that I cite on my comments in the document, the article will meet the requirements to be published and will be a great improvement to the knowledge about Dendrobatidae.
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I very much like the study and I find te amount of data impressive and very comprehesinve. Illustrations are great. However, I found some aspects the authors should reconsider, see below. Sme of the aspects may need restructuring and rewriting. I look forward to seeing the paper paper, which makes an importnt contribution to poison frog biology/taxonomy.
Line 47, you say originally described on the basis of 5 specimens, later (line 97) you refer to the holotype plus 3 paratypes (as in line622). Was it 4 or 5 specimens?
Line115f. Does any of these localities correspond to the type locality, if not, how far away from the type locality are we?
Line 156f. Some of the references cited here have never seen A. ingeri. It think that just Cochran & Goin (1979) and Silverstone (1976) are really useful sources here, who have studied the type material. Still you do not explain why you refer your specimens to A. ingeri! You have to defend your decision (which I agree with). I see you did so in the discussion, but I would like to see this earlier and then still (in more detail) in the discussion. For instance, why don't you mention here that you have at least had photographs of the type at USNM? And where is your list of material studied, at all?
Line 196, for A. hahneli and relatives see (I miss this important reference here): Twomey, E., and Brown, J. L. (2008). ''A partial revision of the Ameerega hahneli complex (Anura: Dendrobatidae) and a new cryptic species from the East-Andean versant of Central Peru.'' Zootaxa, 1757, 49-65.
Line 287f. How many specimens did you study, where are the vouchers and did you deposit your data on GenBank? Not clear. You only studied 16S rRNA -- why? One mtDNA marker only can be misleading. I am wondering if you have no access to other markers? In line 588 you yourself admit that 16S only is not informative and that your data are little conclusive given that there is the Guillory paper (this also implies that you agree with these authors that they studied A. ingeri – this perhaps sounded different in line 102f.). Why did you study 16S at all? Maybe just use the 16S fragment for barcoding (p-distance) and ASAP plus bPTP without any attempt to put this into a phylogenetic context.
Line 321: I think it should read Silverstone 1976, not 1975
Line 329: What is the context of "On the other hand, the "Niceforo" in Niceforo’s Poison Frog refers to..."?
Line 569 should read Schlüter, Schluter
Line 600, are these percentages uncorrected p-distance?
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