PONE-D-21-10011

Tropical Storm Debby: soundscape and fish sound production in Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico

PLOS ONE

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As noted in my response, please pay careful attention to the reviewers comments and also tighten up the writing for more focus on the interesting biophony aspects.

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Dennis M. Higgs

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

As you can see both reviewers, both of whom are expert in the field, find much positive to say about the data collected in the current study but both request major changes and after my own review I find I agree with all their recommendations. The fact that recorders were placed before a major storm event did result in an interesting natural experiment but the limitations of this being an unreplicated observation should be addressed. Both reviewers also find the manuscript would be significantly strengthened with less focus on the geophony and more on the biophony. Please address all reviewers comments carefully.

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[The work was supported by NOAA Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship (awarded to A.D.B. | https://www.noaa.gov/office-education/hollings-scholarship). Development and construction of the Digital SpectroGram recorders built in this study was supported by a grant (awarded to P.S.) from the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (OCE-0741705 | https://www.nopp.org). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.].    

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Reviewers' comments:

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: I like the topic of the paper, and the idea of taking opportunistic data and finding something novel in the biological effects. Unfortunately, your main points and interesting take home messages felt a little lost in the main body of text. It felt like you were trying to put too many ideas into what should be a fairly simple paper (i.e. a storm event causing fish vocalizations to decrease due to masking/ silencing effects). I suggest you try to condense your writing and focus on the biophony aspect. I hope some of my specific comments help with this.

While reading the manuscript I also had a couple major questions:

1) How often storm events occur in the area? What are the knock on effects of lots of storm events versus one or two each year?

2) You mention Tropical Storm Debby was not a major tropical cyclone. Therefore, how often do different intensity storm events occur and what are your predictions for the relationship to sound? For example, the category 4 hurricane Charley did not inhibit fish production (line 78) but not reference the category for Debby thus making comparisons difficult.

Specific comments

Introduction

Line 60: this sentence repeats itself, suggest you omit.

Lines 66 – 76: this section is very repetitive, and I suggest could be condensed.

Line 99: The authors make it seem like these recorders were placed in Tampa Bay to record the storm. However, I suspect it was serendipitous that the storm occurred, and they could look back and see the effects on noise in the area. I think the authors should be forthcoming about this as (at least in my opinion) this is a major advantage of PAM that you never truly know what you will record!

Methods

Line 152: why was a level of 0.5m chosen as the pivotal value?

Line 164: how were fish sounds identified to species? And are the sounds published? If not these should be included in the methodology as example spectrograms.

Table 1 is not needed as these values are well known in the acoustics literature

Results

Figures 4 and 6: I suggest clustering the bar plot as frequencies, with before, during and after in different colours, as I think that would better show your differences.

It would also be worth knowing how far away each of the stations was from the ‘epicentre’ of the storm event as it passed and maybe making some predictions of source levels.

Line 280: Again, I wonder how you distinguished these call types and if able to separate species could you not separate in Figure 7? Perhaps one species effected more than another? Why did you group all fish calls together?

Discussion

The description of environmental change with Debby at that start of the discussion although useful seems irrelevant if not linked to your main aim of investigating the effect of the storm on fish acoustic activity.

At the moment the increase in sound levels during a storm event doesn’t seem to be particularly novel, I think any acoustician would expect this in the low frequencies due to wind/rain noise. What is novel is linking it to fish sounds.

At the beginning of the biophony section you talk about dolphins, this seems irrelevant and I suggest you omit as your focus is fish in your results.

Could you split fish species and make discussions about how the storm effects different species differently?

Could fish habituate to the sound of storm events if happens regularly? I would expand on depth effects and how fish could move to deeper locations to seek acoustic refuge.

Lines 420 – 431: you compare your study to others on storm events. However, you do not mention if similar species were present or even fish groups. Furthermore, were the storms during comparable times of the year? Besides methodological differences, these differences would also effect comparing results between studies.

At the end of the discussion you deviate into talking about anthropogenic noise, I don’t think this is a needed topic in this paper.

Overall, the discussion is too long with too many ideas and little focus or direction. I suggest removing the information on geophony/anthrophony and really homing in on the biophony (both in the results and discussion) as this is the really interesting stuff!

Reviewer #2: This study explores the effect of a storm on the local soundscape and the number of fish calls in an area. The article is well structured and easy to read. However, it suffers mainly from pseudoreplication: the authors recorded the soundscape in only one area (although 2 sites) affected by the storm before, during and after. There are no proper controls, it is therefore impossible to draw robust conclusions from the study. I believe that the study should still be published (as studies in the field are rare and a replicated study is very difficult to conduct), but this problem needs to be clearly stated in the abstract and in the discussion.

More specific comments:

- In the introduction, the authors state that PAM is ideal methodology to examine the biological responses to and recovery after storms… Their results however attract more questions than answers (did the fish stop calling, did they leave the area, did they die?). Although PAM can be a useful tool, in this case, it only gives us some limited information on what exactly is happening. It would be worth discussing this point made in the introduction back in the discussion.

- It would be good to have some hypothesis in the introduction on to what the investigators are expecting as results, based on existing literature

- Methods: fish calls were counted for each 24-hour period: fish calls usually vary a lot during the day, did you try to calculate the fish calls per smaller amount of time, e.g. dawn/dusk, night/day ? Do you think it could bring up other important trends?

- L 186: please explain how exactly you could determine if masking was affecting your rates, it is unclear

- Fig. 7: how is it possible to get a negative mean number? I think this data should be presented as boxplots rather than histograms.

- L378: avoid double negative ‘not unexpected’

- L 382 – 393: could the change of water depth during the storm also have altered the ambient noise propagation?

- L. 196 – 502: How can you be sure that anthropogenic noise did not mask fish calls significantly during your study?

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Lucille Chapuis

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Tropical Storm Debby: soundscape and fish sound production in Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico

PONE-D-21-10011R1

Dear Dr. Boyd,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: