Dear Dr Hauss and co-authors,

I believe that your responses to the comments from both reviewers are well balanced and appropriate. Your plan for a revised manuscript appears adequate and satisfies me.

You asked for my opinion regarding possible revisions to Figures 4 and 5.

Regarding Figure 4, one way of displaying the numerous zero abundances for the two groups “gelatinous plankton” and “euphausids/decapods” would be to not only indicate the mean abundance and standard deviation at each depth level, but also overlay the median abundances (individuals m^-3) with a separate symbol in the right column of Figure 4.

Regarding Figure 5, the main improvement I recommend would be to keep the same groups order (A to E) as in Figure 4. For example, gelatinous plankton are shown in panel E in Fig. 4, but are shown in panel C in Fig.5. This is confusing.

Finally, I note that the Kiko et al. (2015) reference, mentioned twice in the text, is missing from the list of references.

Best regards,
Denis Gilbert