Quantification of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) production in the sea anemone <i>Aiptasia</i> sp. to simulate the sea-to-air flux from coral reefs

Franchini, Filippo; Steinke, Michael

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-5765-2017

Articles | Volume 14, issue 24

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-5765-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-5765-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 24

Research article

|

21 Dec 2017

Research article |

| 21 Dec 2017

Quantification of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) production in the sea anemone Aiptasia sp. to simulate the sea-to-air flux from coral reefs

Filippo Franchini and Michael Steinke

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Final revised paper (published on 21 Dec 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 03 Mar 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Reviewer', Anonymous Referee #1, 15 Mar 2017
- AC1: 'Response to Referee 1', Michael Steinke, 26 Jun 2017
RC2: 'Comments of anonymous referee #2', Anonymous Referee #2, 30 Mar 2017
- AC2: 'Response to Referee 2', Michael Steinke, 26 Jun 2017
AC3: 'Revised Manuscript', Michael Steinke, 26 Jun 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (29 Jun 2017) by Gerhard Herndl

AR by Michael Steinke on behalf of the Authors (29 Jun 2017)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (07 Aug 2017) by Gerhard Herndl

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (23 Aug 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The paper has improved enormously. It is now easy to read and to understand. Good job.
However, I have some minor comments:

P3 L34: “To quantify the net production of DMS released into the aqueous medium by the holobiont…”; I think you should write “… the net concentration of DMS released…” You cannot release a production into the sourounding water.

P4 L20: “Note that N does not reflect the actual number of symbionts within anemones but was arbitrarily set in order to calculate the proportion of clade i among all clades within anemones.” How did you decide, which cell numbers are reasonable to use for you simulations. You wrote in table 1 a range of 0-100 cells. That seems to be a quit small number. You said that you tested also with 1000 cells. Are there not millions of Symbiodinium cells in the anemones? Please give a reference or a reason for the small cell numbers you selected and if this reflects the real abundance of symbiont cells in the anemones. Did you run the model also with a higher cell number like 10 000 or even 1 million cells? Is the output still the same?

P7 L25-27: “Last but not least corals calcify and this might change the allocation of resources within the host with consequences on the type of relationship with their symbionts under stress conditions.” What do you mean with this? How can a different allocation of resources influence the relationship between host and symbionts? Can you clarify?

P7 L30: “The percentage of the gross production escaping into the water surrounding the anemones ranged from 1 to 120%...” 120%? Is more released into the water than is produced? This is not realistic.

Fig 3: In the label of x-axis you wrote DMSPA and in the caption you wrote DMSPH. Please change the label. You forgot to describe DMSaq NP in the caption.

Ref. Kemp et al. 2014 you wrote “during, and after a coral beaching event “, please change to “bleaching”.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (24 Sep 2017) by Gerhard Herndl

AR by Michael Steinke on behalf of the Authors (11 Oct 2017) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Dimethyl sulfide (DMS) is a biogenic gas known to many as the 'smell of the sea' but it also stimulates the formation of clouds and cools our planet. Few data are available on its production along tropical coasts and here we quantify DMS in a sea anemone. We then use this information to simulate the release of DMS in coral reefs and highlight that we lack information on DMS-consumption processes if we were to quantify the effect of environmental change on DMS emission from tropical reefs.