Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 17, 2021
Decision Letter - Wan-Xi Yang, Editor

PONE-D-21-26592Macrosymbionts of starfish Echinaster luzonicus (Gray, 1840), with a new biogeographic record of scaleworm Asterophilia carlae Hanley, 1989, in the waters of a volcanic western Pacific islandPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Hwang,

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.

1. Data in the current manuscript are from the year 2020. More data are needed for this work. 

2. The "Discussion" part needs in-depth-discussion.

3. This manuscript needs  a suitable title.

4. All figures should be added the scale bar.

If you plan to submit a revision, the revision will be sent to previous reviewers for further consideration. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 01 2022 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:

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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,

Wan-Xi Yang, Ph.D.

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. In your Methods section, please provide additional information regarding the permits you obtained for the work. Please ensure you have included the full name of the authority that approved the field site access and, if no permits were required, a brief statement explaining why.

3. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: "Financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan through grant no. MOST 108-2811-M-019-504, MOST 109-2811-M-019-504 and MOST 110-2811-M-019-504 to L.-C. Tseng, as well as grant no. MOST 106-2621-M-019-001, MOST 107-2621-M-019-001, MOST 108-2621-M-019-003, MOST 109-2621-M-019-002, and MOST 110-2621-M-019-001, and Center of Excellence for Ocean Engineering (Grant No. 109J13801-51) to J.-S. Hwang. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

We note that one or more of the authors is affiliated with the funding organization, indicating the funder may have had some role in the design, data collection, analysis or preparation of your manuscript for publication; in other words, the funder played an indirect role through the participation of the co-authors. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please do the following:

a. Review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. These amendments should be made in the online form.

b. Confirm in your cover letter that you agree with the following statement, and we will change the online submission form on your behalf: 

“The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

4. 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.

5. Please upload a copy of Supporting Information S1 file which you refer to in your text on page 24.

[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

Reviewer #2: Partly

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: 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: After reading the whole manuscript, I do not see the reasons to why scaleworm Asterophilia carlae should appear in the title as there are other new findings as well. What is so special with scaleworm Asterophilia carlae?

Results were well presented and discussed. However, I suggest discussion to start with general observation followed by specific data. Therefore, from lines 277 to 290 where the others are discussing general observation, should have stated earlier.

Line 155: I don’t know the reason why the others present issues of medicinal value of the species Echinaster luzonicus. I think the others were supposed to confine themselves in distribution and variability among the study species especially in this paragraph.

Compare lines 157-159 and lines 130-132: While previous studies show different macrosymbionts to coexist on E. luzonicus, the findings of this study shows each individuat starfish to host one species of macrosymbiont. I therefore expected this to be discussed here

Reviewer #2: The data of the ms are only from 2020, so the results are somewhat accidental and simple, the reliability need to be considered. It is recommended to increase the sampling time. All figures should be added the scale bar.

**********

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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

Reviewer #2: 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.

Revision 1

Author responses to referee comments (29th August 2022)

Date: Jul 18 2022 03:12PM

To: "Jiang-Shiou Hwang" jshwang@mail.ntou.edu.tw;jshwang@ntou.edu.tw

From: "PLOS ONE" plosone@plos.org

Subject: PLOS ONE Decision: Revision required [PONE-D-21-26592]

PONE-D-21-26592

Macrosymbionts of starfish Echinaster luzonicus (Gray, 1840), with a new biogeographic record of scaleworm Asterophilia carlae Hanley, 1989, in the waters of a volcanic western Pacific island

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Hwang,

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.

1. Data in the current manuscript are from the year 2020. More data are needed for this work.

2. The "Discussion" part needs in-depth-discussion.

3. This manuscript needs a suitable title.

4. All figures should be added the scale bar.

If you plan to submit a revision, the revision will be sent to previous reviewers for further consideration.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 01 2022 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,

Wan-Xi Yang, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Authors’ response: We are thankful for the very constructive comments and efforts from two reviewers. We fully agree with the suggestions and have corrected them accordingly and hopefully eradicated errors.

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. In your Methods section, please provide additional information regarding the permits you obtained for the work. Please ensure you have included the full name of the authority that approved the field site access and, if no permits were required, a brief statement explaining why.

3. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: "Financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan through grant no. MOST 108-2811-M-019-504, MOST 109-2811-M-019-504 and MOST 110-2811-M-019-504 to L.-C. Tseng, as well as grant no. MOST 106-2621-M-019-001, MOST 107-2621-M-019-001, MOST 108-2621-M-019-003, MOST 109-2621-M-019-002, and MOST 110-2621-M-019-001, and Center of Excellence for Ocean Engineering (Grant No. 109J13801-51) to J.-S. Hwang. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

We note that one or more of the authors is affiliated with the funding organization, indicating the funder may have had some role in the design, data collection, analysis or preparation of your manuscript for publication; in other words, the funder played an indirect role through the participation of the co-authors. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please do the following:

a. Review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. These amendments should be made in the online form.

b. Confirm in your cover letter that you agree with the following statement, and we will change the online submission form on your behalf:

“The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

4. 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.

5. Please upload a copy of Supporting Information S1 file which you refer to in your text on page 24.

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

Review Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1:

After reading the whole manuscript, I do not see the reasons to why scaleworm Asterophilia carlae should appear in the title as there are other new findings as well. What is so special with scaleworm Asterophilia carlae?

Authors’ response: We are thankful for the constructive comments. Since scaleworm Asterophilia carlae was found for the first time in the study waters, therefore its name was specifically put in the title. We changed the title to “Macrosymbionts of starfish Echinaster luzonicus (Gray, 1840) in the waters of a volcanic western Pacific island”.

Results were well presented and discussed. However, I suggest discussion to start with general observation followed by specific data. Therefore, from lines 277 to 290 where the others are discussing general observation, should have stated earlier.

Authors’ response: We are thankful for the very constructive comments and efforts from the reviewer. In the corrected version, we have rearranged the paragraphs and descriptions as suggested.

Line 155: I don’t know the reason why the others present issues of medicinal value of the species Echinaster luzonicus. I think the others were supposed to confine themselves in distribution and variability among the study species especially in this paragraph.

Authors’ response: Thanks for the useful advice. This sentence has been deleted as suggested.

Compare lines 157-159 and lines 130-132: While previous studies show different macrosymbionts to coexist on E. luzonicus, the findings of this study shows each individuat starfish to host one species of macrosymbiont. I therefore expected this to be discussed here.

Authors’ response: The term "coexist" means that these symbiotic animals have all been recorded on starfish E. luzonicus. These references do not record the presence of two coexisting animals on a single starfish individual.

Reviewer #2:

The data of the ms are only from 2020, so the results are somewhat accidental and simple, the reliability need to be considered. It is recommended to increase the sampling time. All figures should be added the scale bar.

Authors’ response: We are thankful for the suggestions. Due to research funding constraints, we can only conduct the survey in 2020, so we do not have survey data for 2021 to the present. The survey will continue in the future with the support of funding. In July of this year (2022), we visited the surveyed reefs again and only recorded Zenopontonia soror symbiosis with starfish E. luzonicus. So far, there are very few records of Asterophilia carlae, and probably its population is not abundant, so the chance of discovery is also very low. In 2020, both surveys covered more than 90% of the reef area, and the results obtained can definitely be relied on. We have added a scale bar in Figures 3-5 in the corrected version of the manuscript.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: MS TI starfish symbionts Response to Reviewers 0829.docx
Decision Letter - Wan-Xi Yang, Editor

Macrosymbionts of starfish Echinaster luzonicus (Gray, 1840), with a new biogeographic record of scaleworm Asterophilia carlae Hanley, 1989, in the waters of a volcanic western Pacific island

PONE-D-21-26592R1

Dear Dr. Hwang,

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,

Wan-Xi Yang, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. 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

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. 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: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. 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

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. 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 accept the manuscript after major revision done. The authors were able to answer one question after another I gave in my first review. They also improved presentation of the manuscript, i find it to be better than the way it was before. Basing on my understanding and the way they discussed the data, I recommend that the manuscript is accepted

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

7. 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

Reviewer #3: Yes: Boping Tang

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Wan-Xi Yang, Editor

PONE-D-21-26592R1

Macrosymbionts of starfish Echinaster luzonicus (Gray, 1840) in the waters of a volcanic western Pacific island

Dear Dr. Hwang:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. 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.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Wan-Xi Yang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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