PONE-D-21-17662Cover Letter for maunuscript with the title “Identification of tolerance levels on the cold-water coral Desmophyllum pertusum (Lophelia pertusa) from realistic exposure conditions to suspended bentonite, barite and drill cutting particles”PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Baussant,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

I apologize for the delay in getting your work reviewed. It has been very difficult to find reviewers due to many things happening, I have now one reviewer's report and I have read through your manuscript and I think, as mentioned by the reviewer, there are some clarifications needed with respect to material and methods and data analysis.please revise according the to comment and resubmitdepending on the changes, I may or may not send it out for review againlooking forward to the revised manuscript

Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 11 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Shashank Keshavmurthy, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

3. In your Methods section, please provide additional location information of the collection sites, including geographic coordinates for the data set if available.

4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: 

"The performance of this study and the writing of the manuscript was financed by Equinor AS. We are particularly grateful for their role in the study design, discussions of the results, decision to publish, discussions and comments on the manuscript made by Tone K. Frost and Ingunn Nilsen from Equinor AS. NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS contributed also with internal financial support to the final writing of the manuscript."

We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. 

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: 

"The performance of this study and the writing of the manuscript was financed by Equinor AS. We are particularly grateful for their role in the study design, discussions of the results, decision to publish, discussions and comments on the manuscript made by Tone K. Frost and Ingunn Nilsen from Equinor AS. NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS contributed also with internal financial support to the final writing of the manuscript."

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

5. Thank you for stating the following in the Financial Disclosure section: 

"This study and the writing of the manuscript was financed by Equinor AS under contract #4590073409. We are particularly grateful for their role in the study design, discussions of the results, decision to publish, discussions and comments on the manuscript made by Tone K. Frost and Ingunn Nilsen from Equinor AS."  

We note that you received funding from a commercial source: Equinor AS

Please provide an amended Competing Interests Statement that explicitly states this commercial funder, along with any other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, marketed products, etc. 

Within this Competing Interests Statement, please confirm that this does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests).  If there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared. 

Please include your amended Competing Interests Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf.

6. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

7. PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ

8. We note that Figure 6 in your submission contain copyrighted images. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright.

We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission:

a. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figure 6 to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. 

We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text:

“I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.”

Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an "Other" file with your submission. 

In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].”

b. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only.

9. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I reviewed the ms entitled “Identification of tolerance levels on the cold-water coral Desmophyllum pertusum (Lophelia pertusa) from realistic exposure conditions to suspended bentonite, barite and drill cutting particles” by Thierry Baussant et al. This study explored the tolerances of a CWC (Desmophyllum pertusum syn. Lophelia pertusa) to suspended particle concentration from the oil industry, particularly drill cutting particles. I am aware that the information about this topic is still scarce, thus, this is an important contribution to the general topic of CWC’s and its vulnerability to offshore oil-drilling operations. Overall, the manuscript is well written, technically sound, and the data support the conclusions. Furthermore, I can see interesting findings, particularly in the tolerance of this species to those additional stressors. I am concerned with some of their approaches in the data analysis and there is some missing information in the way how the replicates were treated (replicates for experimental design, decisions made for pooling data, etc). However, I consider these additions to be minor and easily incorporated into the ms.

The methods are well written and sufficiently detailed as to replicate the experimental work. I would include a table of the ANOVA’s with the F-statistic, degree of freedom, p-value, etc. Also please include the n for all the analysis. It is not clearly stated if the experimental design and data analysis was performed on the actual “nubbins” (pooled data) or at the tank/cone replication. If it was the former, a better description is needed on how did you decide to pool data, What p-value did you use? What considerations were taken into account for pooling or not pooling?Introduction

The introduction is well written and provide with the enough information for the study. It has a clear and stated hypothesis.

Line 91: Should be mg l-1?

Methods

Line 183-189: Please provide more information about the measurement equipment: salinity and temperature with precision and accuracy of the measurement.

Line 147 – line 195: Wrong citation format

Line 206 – 210: Is this a standardize methodology? If so, please provide with a cite for this method.

Coral experiments and measurements

Line 227-230: It is not clear to me how you got dry-weight from B-W, since B-W means to weight the fragments in the water. Also, I understand DW was used for standardization of % growth rate, but also to quantify growth rates? I am a little confused about this. Please clarify.

Line 230: I know surface area is better than DW for standardization of respiration rates. Please provide a reasoning why using DW instead of SA? Can you cite previous work for this?

Data analysis

lines 273 – 277: “replicate tank nested factor was tested using a Kruskal-Wallis analysis (p<0.05), and the data from the replicate tanks were pooled if the assumption of equal distribution was verified”. Please be more specific about this analysis. Did you pool all your fragments from the different cones? or Cones were treated as independent?

Line 286 – 290. The authors state that for growth rate and polyp mortality measurements, “the

ANOVA assumptions were violated, and the effects of DC and BABE treatments were analyzed using a Kruskal–Wallis test on ranks at each sampling time, i.e. T1, T2 (p<0.05)”. Did you apply corrections for multiple comparison? i.e. Bonferroni correction? Also, it is not clear to me what do you mean with “Kruskal–Wallis test on ranks at each sampling time, i.e. T1, T2 (p < 0.05)? T1 and T2 were significantly different? are those values part of the results? The same as for line 290: Were values pooled or not pooled?

Line 264 – check for typo

Line 288 – check for typo

Results and Discussion

Respiration rates: “Under stress conditions, such as with the presence of solid particles in the water, one could expect an increase in respiration rate consequent to the higher metabolic activity resulting from the removal of particles by polyps and mucus secretion”. Could you provide a better explanation on why respiration rates are unaffected under such stressful conditions? Why is this lack of sensitivity?

Polyp mortality:

Line 506 – 510: “In the DC experiment, we found that polyp mortality determination measured during days with addition of food particles and days without food addition was equal (Wilcoxon signed rank test, p=0.103). Hence, data from days of feeding and no feeding were pooled to test differences in polyp mortality resulting from DC treatments at T1 and T2”. As stated above, I am a little bit concern about the procedure of pooling data. Do you have any other previous work that validate your assumption? Normally, a conservative estimate of the p-value for pooling data should be above p>0.25, however, I might be outdated about this procedure. Please provide a reasoning.

Line 531 – 533: I would start the paragraph with the actual value of % polyp mortality found in your study, and then compared to the other studies. I know you referenced the figure 7, but it would be helpful for the reader to find the actual values found in your study written in the paragraph.

Line 551 – 554: It looks speculative. Does not support/explain your results.

Figure 2. What is the n for each treatment? See also comments in the methods section.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Identification of tolerance levels on the cold-water coral Desmophyllum pertusum (Lophelia pertusa) from realistic exposure conditions to suspended bentonite, barite and drill cutting particles

PONE-D-21-17662R1

Dear Dr. Baussant,

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.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Shashank Keshavmurthy, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: