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Comment from the corresponding author regarding the confidence interval calculations in the manuscript

Posted by PLOS_ONE_Group on 27 Oct 2025 at 17:59 GMT

For their confidence interval calculations, Mays et al. (2025) stated in this article that they used “standard errors set to 0.1 g (equivalent to the precision limits of the instrument used for measuring mass)”; however, this is contradicted in their Supplementary Table (S3 File, therein). Instead, they used the square-root of the sample mass as an approximation of their standard deviation of sample mass (s2) for single samples (as outlined in their S1 Table). These provided consistently conservative (wider) confidence intervals than the 0.1 value. Therefore, the error is only in the text, but not the presented calculations and data.

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