Herbivore and pollinator body size effects on strawberry fruit quality

Annika Leigh Salzberg; Heather Grab; Casey Hale; Katja Poveda

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0305370

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 30, 2023
17 Jan 2024 Decision Letter - Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui, Editor PONE-D-23-40097The impact of land use change on intraspecific variation in pollinators and herbivores and its effect on strawberry productionPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Salzberg, 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 02 2024 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, Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui, 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. Did you know that depositing data in a repository is associated with up to a 25% citation advantage (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416)? If you’ve not already done so, consider depositing your raw data in a repository to ensure your work is read, appreciated and cited by the largest possible audience. You’ll also earn an Accessible Data icon on your published paper if you deposit your data in any participating repository (https://plos.org/open-science/open-data/#accessible-data). 3. Please expand the acronym “NIFA” (as indicated in your financial disclosure) so that it states the name of your funders in full. This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. When completing the data availability statement of the submission form, you indicated that you will make your data available on acceptance. We strongly recommend all authors decide on a data sharing plan before acceptance, as the process can be lengthy and hold up publication timelines. Please note that, though access restrictions are acceptable now, your entire data will need to be made freely accessible if your manuscript is accepted for publication. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If you are unable to adhere to our open data policy, please kindly revise your statement to explain your reasoning and we will seek the editor's input on an exemption. Please be assured that, once you have provided your new statement, the assessment of your exemption will not hold up the peer review process. 5. 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. Additional Editor Comments: Dear authors Please perform the suggested revision and send it back as soon as possible. [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: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: 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: 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: The manuscript “The impact of land use change on intraspecific variation in pollinators and herbivores and its effect on strawberry production” proposes to study the effect of the body size of a pollinator species and a pest species on strawberry production. Overall the manuscript is interesting, however, several major concerns need to be addressed. ### Major concerns ### 1) What is the distance between sites? Are they spatially independent? What about spatial autocorrelation? 2) I don't understand where the pests were collected in the study sites, in which crop, etc. Moreover, you only collected the pests, not the pollinators. Without this element, the field study is missing half the story. I.e., what was the effect of landscape gradient on bumble bee size? 3) You selected individuals with the smallest body size (selected by eye) vs. individuals with the largest body size (also selected by eye) to make up your experimental design. Do you know why your individuals are smaller? Are they of lower individual quality (in terms of physiology)? If so, is morphology (body size) the driver of pollination efficiency or physiology? 4) It is not clear if the small pests come from specific locations and the large pests come from other specific locations. If this is the case, you have a confounding effect with the population, and this could disturb the experimental design based on the body size alone. 5) In the cage pollination experiment, you put plants in cages with a colony of bumble bees, if I understand correctly. However, with this method, there is little pollen diversity carried by the bumble bees, since it comes from the same plant or another genetically similar plant. Maybe this helps explain why you find no difference in fruit weight between small and large bumble bees. Perhaps under field conditions, large bumble bees could carry larger quantities and more diverse pollen since they could potentially travel farther to acquire pollen than small individuals. 6) The discussion could be improved by adding a comparison of the results obtained with the literature on strawberry production. Are the results realistic in terms of fruit weight? Another point that is missing is fruit set. In pollination experiment, the effect on fruit set is usually tested first, and a stronger effect is found than on fruit quality (excepted for seed number). This should be discussed in the context of the present study. ### Point-by-point comments ### Title: The title should clearly state that the study considered a single pollinator species and a single pest species. Also, "The impact of land use change on strawberry production" is not really tested in this study. I found the title unrelated to the work done. Lines 63-65 : It is not clear if you are referring to species differences in body size, or a decrease in body size of individuals of a species. Lines 83-93 : I found this part a bit repetitive. Lines 98-124 : Most of the text presented here is not related to Materials and Methods, but should be moved to the Introduction as material justifying the use of strawberry as a "study case". Lines 100-102: perhaps use hectares instead of acres? Line 116: The reference is in the wrong format. Line 115: I think a parenthesis is missing. Line 125: What was the effect of landscape gradient on bumble bee size? Without this element, the field study is missing half the story. Lines 126-127: You should include the latitude and longitude for transparency on the overall location of the study. Line 131: Why are these radii chosen? It would be useful to determine this based on the foraging range of pollinators and pests, with references. Line 133: I don't understand "Categories of land cover quantified were agricultural, ..." Line 135: Again, it would be great to justify the choice of such landscape parameters based on assumptions of landscape effects and references. Lines 135-137: I don't understand where the pests were collected, in what crop, etc. Lines 156-161: In my opinion, this analysis does not present an argument that the bees used in the study are representative of the standard range of bee sizes for the region. They compared them to commercial bees imported from other regions, not to the wild population of the region. Line 176: The distinction between outdoor and greenhouse is not well shown in Figure 2. Lines 179-182: It might be interesting to look at the visitation history of pollinators in the cage experiments if you collected this data. For example, if a bumble bee's first visit is to a secondary flower used in the experiment, the resulting fruit may be different than if the bumblebee had previously visited other flowers. I acknowledge that this may be complex and that the sample size may not allow for this type of analysis. Lines 197-198: It is not clear if the small pests come from specific locations and the large pests come from other specific locations. If this is the case, you have a confounding effect with the population, and this could confound the experimental design based only on body size. Line 199: Did you discard the plants on which the lygus died within 24 hours? This is unclear to me. Line 203-205: Is there a species here? I don't understand this sentence. Line 212: Please explain how you determined the sex of the individuals. Lines 230-232: If I understand well, you have quite small sample sizes for fruits exposed to lygus and pollinated. Did you check for normality in these small sample sizes? Line 242: It is not clear what you mean by developed land cover. It would be great to present what you are including as land use type. Line 243: You use lower case for numbers here and upper case for numbers. Standardize. Lines 244-245: You need to add that this result is not significant and dash the prediction lines in Figure 3B. L250 : Please close the parenthesis. L258-259 : You have to present the direction of the effect. Positive? Negative? Reviewer #2: The growth of the body in insects such as the bumble bees is stopped due to the existence of the exoskeleton after the larval and pupal stage turn to adult, so feeding in the pre-adult stage is very important, which is often done by nurse bees. On the other hand, because the feeding of the larvae is very dependent on the activity of the nurse and forager bees, therefore, the quality of the plant host is not the only effective factor. For the growth of pollinator bees, the ratio of different plant pollens and the presence of mineral elements and amino acids are also necessary. In summary, many factors are important in changing the body size of pollinator bees that were not considered in this experiment. However, The results are acceptable. ****** 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 Reviewer #2: Yes: Dr. Alireza Monfared ******** [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. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: PONE-D-23-40097 A. Monfared Final.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305370.r001
Revision 1
4 Mar 2024 Author Response Dear Dr. Ghasemi-Soloklui and PLOS ONE reviewers, We would like to thank you all for your careful review and valuable comments on our manuscript! We feel that your guidance has helped significantly improve our work. Below, please find our responses to all points raised by reviewers. Addressing comments from the editor: 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The files have been checked and renamed in accordance with PLOS ONE’s style requirements. Additional edits were also made, including adjusting font size/style of headings, properly formatting author affiliations, removing funding sources from acknowledgements section, and adding supplemental figure information at the end of the document. 2. If you’ve not already done so, consider depositing your raw data in a repository to ensure your work is read, appreciated, and cited by the largest possible audience. We have uploaded our data to Dryad, DOI: 10.5061/dryad.4mw6m90j1, and we will change the settings to make it publicly available if our manuscript is accepted. 3. Please expand the acronym “NIFA” (as indicated in your financial disclosure) so that it states the name of your funders in full. Thank you, we have made this change. 4. When completing the data availability statement of the submission form, you indicated that you will make your data available on acceptance. We strongly recommend all authors decide on a data sharing plan before acceptance, as the process can be lengthy and hold up publication timelines. Please note that, though access restrictions are acceptable now, your entire data will need to be made freely accessible if your manuscript is accepted for publication. We have uploaded all our data and code to Dryad, DOI: 10.5061/dryad.4mw6m90j1, and we will make all data publicly available if our manuscript is accepted. Temporary access for editors: https://datadryad.org/stash/share/7Uje8Cu-TV_gPw6VCTIaNNZCP7yFt1uwvYm7EnORr14 5. 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. The supporting information files have been updated to conform to PLOS ONE’s naming guidelines. Addressing Additional Editor Comments: Reviewer #1: ### Major concerns ### 1) What is the distance between sites? Are they spatially independent? What about spatial autocorrelation? Our sites were spatially independent, and I have added the results of a Mantel test for spatial autocorrelation into the methods section to show this. Those numbers can be found in the “Tarnished plant bug size across the landscape gradient” section. Thank you! 2) a)I don't understand where the pests were collected in the study sites, in which crop, etc. b) Moreover, you only collected the pests, not the pollinators. Without this element, the field study is missing half the story. I.e., what was the effect of landscape gradient on bumble bee size? a) Thank you for pointing out this oversight! I have clarified in the text where the pest were collected, and that they were collected in strawberry fields and the weedy field margins around them. b) To address your second point – no, we did not collect pollinators, so unfortunately we do not have access to body size data on worker Bombus impatiens individuals. However, work has been done on multiple Bombus species (and many other species of wild bees) examining their body size across landscape, and I have added references in the discussion section to multiple papers detailing that work. 3) You selected individuals with the smallest body size (selected by eye) vs. individuals with the largest body size (also selected by eye) to make up your experimental design. Do you know why your individuals are smaller? Are they of lower individual quality (in terms of physiology)? If so, is morphology (body size) the driver of pollination efficiency or physiology? This is an excellent question, but unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper to answer based on the experiments we ran. To postulate a possible answer however - I would not expect smaller individuals to necessarily be of lower individual quality, as there can be both benefits and detriments to being larger or smaller. This may be more of a concern if we were to test pollination efficiency in the field (as larger bees can often fly further, perhaps accessing more pollen resources and making pollination efficiency more of a physiology question). However, since there was no impediment to accessing the flowers based on distance to be flown (the microcolonies were about 1-2 feet away from the test plants) we can say with reasonable certainty that morphology rather than physiology was the force at play in pollination efficiency in our study. 4) It is not clear if the small pests come from specific locations and the large pests come from other specific locations. If this is the case, you have a confounding effect with the population, and this could disturb the experimental design based on the body size alone. I believe you’re discussing the bugs used in our second experiment, the pollination x pest damage experiment. I have added text in the methods explaining where the bugs for this experiment were captured, and I have added an additional analysis showing that for the pests collected for this bioassay, insect size did not differ by site. Thank you for pointing out this omission! 5) In the cage pollination experiment, you put plants in cages with a colony of bumble bees, if I understand correctly. However, with this method, there is little pollen diversity carried by the bumble bees, since it comes from the same plant or another genetically similar plant. Maybe this helps explain why you find no difference in fruit weight between small and large bumble bees. Perhaps under field conditions, large bumble bees could carry larger quantities and more diverse pollen since they could potentially travel farther to acquire pollen than small individuals. Thank you for this comment! It’s true that the bees were exposed to less pollen diversity than they would be in field conditions. However, while some plant species require cross pollination to set fruit, strawberry does not (as an autopollinating plant). So, having access to only the strawberry clones in the cages would not be expected to have a major effect on fruit set unless insufficient pollen was transferred (which is possible). I have added text to the discussion addressing this point, thank you! 6) The discussion could be improved by adding a comparison of the results obtained with the literature on strawberry production. Are the results realistic in terms of fruit weight? Another point that is missing is fruit set. In pollination experiment, the effect on fruit set is usually tested first, and a stronger effect is found than on fruit quality (excepted for seed number). This should be discussed in the context of the present study. Thank you for bringing up these points! I was able to find a few papers that reported individual berry weight for the variety used in our study (Seascape) and have added reference that our berries were similar in size to those in the studies I found, and thus realistic in terms of fruit weight. To address your second point, while we did not explicitly look at fruit set, we had fruits that were at nearly 0 weight – so in that sense, we are looking at the combined effect of fruit set and fruit weight together. However, I have also added information and citations into the discussion regarding other studies that have looked at fruit set as well. Thank you! ### Point-by-point comments ### Title: The title should clearly state that the study considered a single pollinator species and a single pest species. Also, "The impact of land use change on strawberry production" is not really tested in this study. I found the title unrelated to the work done. I have reworded the title to more accurately describe the work done, thank you! Lines 63-65 : It is not clear if you are referring to species differences in body size, or a decrease in body size of individuals of a species. This was in reference to intraspecific body size, and has been clarified in the text. Thank you! Lines 83-93 : I found this part a bit repetitive. With this final paragraph of the introduction, we sought to be very explicit in what our hypotheses were and what exact questions we sought to answer. Though this may be a bit repetitive of other points made in the intro, we think it is worth the extra time taken to be very clear about our aims. As the reviewer does not make a specific request as to what should be taken out, and I’m not comfortable removing anything in this paragraph as I feel it would take away from the clarity of our paper, I have not made any changes to this paragraph. Lines 98-124 : Most of the text presented here is not related to Materials and Methods, but should be moved to the Introduction as material justifying the use of strawberry as a "study case". Thank you for this suggestion! We had debated whether to put this section of text in the introduction or the methods, and based on your request we have moved it to the Introduction instead. Lines 100-102: perhaps use hectares instead of acres? I have changed the measurements based on your suggestion, thank you. Line 116: The reference is in the wrong format. Thank you, this has been corrected. Line 115: I think a parenthesis is missing. I have replaced the commas with parentheses as suggested. Line 125: What was the effect of landscape gradient on bumble bee size? Without this element, the field study is missing half the story. ^ I address this comment in the “major concerns” section above, see my response there. Lines 126-127: You should include the latitude and longitude for transparency on the overall location of the study. Thank you, I have added the latitude and longitude of the midpoint of all sites to clarify the location! Line 131: Why are these radii chosen? It would be useful to determine this based on the foraging range of pollinators and pests, with references. Line 135: Again, it would be great to justify the choice of such landscape parameters based on assumptions of landscape effects and references. Thank you for pointing out this oversight – I have added an explanation of why these radii were chosen and added the reference we used to make these choices. Line 133: I don't understand "Categories of land cover quantified were agricultural, ..." Thank you for pointing out this lack of clarity, I have elaborated on how these categories were aggregated from the more granular Cropland Data Layer. Lines 135-137: I don't understand where the pests were collected, in what crop, etc. Thank you for pointing out these missing details – they have been added to the manuscript! Lines 156-161: In my opinion, this analysis does not present an argument that the bees used in the study are representative of the standard range of bee sizes for the region. They compared them to commercial bees imported from other regions, not to the wild population of the region. While it’s true that the studies referenced used commercially acquired hives, both studies took body size measurements later in the season. As Gervais et al. states, “Note that we restricted analyses regarding the morphology of workers to individuals captured at least four weeks after their colony was placed in the field to ensure that the potential effects on morphometrics would be associated to landscape variables, not the commercial rearing process.” While it would have been preferable to compare our bees to wild-caught individuals, data on wild Bombus impatiens body size has not been collected in regional populations, so unfortunately we are unable to make this comparison. Line 176: The distinction between outdoor and greenhouse is not well shown in Figure 2. Since these experiments were both done within cages, it didn’t seem necessary to detail in the figure that the cages were placed outside versus inside the greenhouse – instead, I have added more text to the methods section to clarify where exactly the cages were placed and explained why this was done. From other comments made by the reviewer I can see that I did not include enough detail to be clear about the methods of this part of the study, so hopefully my clarifications throughout the text resolve this issue to the satisfaction of the reviewer! Lines 179-182: It might be interesting to look at the visitation history of pollinators in the cage experiments if you collected this data. For example, if a bumble bee's first visit is to a secondary flower used in the experiment, the resulting fruit may be different than if the bumblebee had previously visited other flowers. I acknowledge that this may be complex and that the sample size may not allow for this type of analysis. Thank you for this comment! The bees involved in the pollination experiment were purposefully trained on strawberry plants in the greenhouse (within their microcolony cages), and while we cannot be 100% certain that each bee did in fact visit one of the training plants, from my anecdotal memory of the pollination trials I did see most microcolony bees had pollen loads from the test plants they’d built up during the training period. However, visit history and pollen load were not recorded and thus we are unable to examine this question. Lines 197-198: It is not clear if the small pests come from specific locations and the large pests come from other specific locations. If this is the case, you have a confounding effect with the population, and this could confound the experimental design based only on body size. This is a valid concern, and to remedy it I have added an additional analysis showing that for the pests collected for this bioassay, insect size did not differ by site. Thank you for pointing out this omission! Line 199: Did you discard the plants on which the lygus died within 24 hours? This is unclear to me. Thank you, yes we did discard those plants from the analysis – I have added text to clarify this. Line 203-205: Is there a species here? I don't understand this sentence. Thank you for pointing this out, this was a grammatical structure error in the sentence! There is no missing species, just an oversight in my editing. I have changed the sentence to clarify that we placed all the plants together into larger cages in order to let the greenhouse staff keep the plants watered but to prevent any stray insects in the greenhouse from affecting the plants in any way. Line 212: Please explain how you determined the sex of the individuals. Thank you, this has been added. Lines 230-232: If I understand well, you have quite small sample sizes for fruits exposed to lygus and pollinated. Did you check for normality in these small sample sizes? Yes, we ran Shapiro-Wilk normality tests, which showed that even though these subsets of data were small, the residuals were normally distributed. Line 242: It is not clear what you mean by developed land cover. It would be great to present what you are including as land use type. I agree this was unclear – to remedy this, I added further clarification in the methods section when I initially described land cover categories. In line 242 as referenced in this comment, I changed the wording to align with the other mentions of urban cover to take out the word “developed.” I was using developed as a synonym, but as this was not consistent throughout the rest of the paper it added confusion and thus I removed it. Thank you! Line 243: You use lower case for numbers here and upper case for numbers. Standardize. I have changed all figure references to be standardized as upper case, thank you for noticing this! Lines 244-245: You need to add that this result is not significant and dash the prediction lines in Figure 3B. Thank you, these changes have been made. L250 : Please close the parenthesis. Done, thank you! L258-259 : You have to present the direction of the effect. Positive? Negative? This https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305370.r002
7 May 2024 Decision Letter - Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui, Editor PONE-D-23-40097R1Larger pests but not pollinators impact strawberry fruit qualityPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Salzberg, 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 21 2024 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, Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 ******** 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 ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 ****** 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 ****** 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 have read this new version of the manuscript and the responses to the comments. I thank the authors for their great job addressing concerns. The manuscript is substantially improved and I believe it will make a great contribution to Plos One. The only concern I have is the new version of the title. I think that the title "Larger pests but not pollinators impact strawberry fruit quality" is a bit misleading and gives the impression that animal pollination doesn’t matter for strawberry, which is contrary to the results of this study and the litterature. ****** 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 ******** [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305370.r003
Revision 2
21 May 2024 Author Response Dear Dr. Ghasemi-Soloklui and PLOS ONE reviewers, We would like to thank you all for your careful review and valuable comments on our manuscript! We feel that your guidance has helped significantly improve our work. Below, please find our responses to all points raised by reviewers. Reviewer #1: I have read this new version of the manuscript and the responses to the comments. I thank the authors for their great job addressing concerns. The manuscript is substantially improved and I believe it will make a great contribution to Plos One. The only concern I have is the new version of the title. I think that the title "Larger pests but not pollinators impact strawberry fruit quality" is a bit misleading and gives the impression that animal pollination doesn’t matter for strawberry, which is contrary to the results of this study and the literature. Thank you for voicing your concern on the title – we agree, the grammar of the title was unclear, and we have modified the title to remove the ambiguity that might imply that animal pollination isn’t important for strawberry. We hope the new title, “Herbivore and pollinator body size effects on strawberry fruit quality” is a better representation of the paper and that this is acceptable to the reviewer. Thank you! Best regards, Annika Salzberg Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305370.r004
30 May 2024 Decision Letter - Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui, Editor Herbivore and pollinator body size effects on strawberry fruit quality PONE-D-23-40097R2 Dear Dr. Salzberg, 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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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, Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305370.r005
Formally Accepted
7 Jun 2024 Acceptance Letter - Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui, Editor PONE-D-23-40097R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Salzberg, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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 customercare@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. Ali Akbar Ghasemi-Soloklui Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305370.r006

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .