Dear Tasnim

Based on the referee's report, I would like to invite you again to upload your revised manuscript that will be send to the referee's again.

If questions remain do not hesitate to contact me
Kind regards
Ann

Dear Author
I have received now the report from both reviewers. One accepted the paper as it is while the other still had two minor remarks for which I agree they should be considered in the material and methods and discussion of your manuscript. So please add for each of the following topics a clarifying paragraph (see comments reviewer)
1. Catch per unit analysis: the correction for sampling effort per time you used, dividing number of individuals with time the trap was deployed, may be inappropriate. The correction would be fine, if amphipods were dripping into the trap constantly, and if the densitiy of ampihpods was even. However, time that amphipods reach the trap depends on time the odor is spread and walking speed. The first hours amphipods may rapidly reach the trap, but more distant individuals arrive with larger and larger lag. This might mean that in your correction nominator increases eg logarithmically and denominator increases linearly, and that traps deployed for longer periods will be corrected “disproportionally more” than traps deployed for shorter periods. Please consider this aspect in your discussion
2. Rarefaction curves: describe your procedure better: how many subsamples were taken, what was the sizes of random subsamples, how many times you run rarefactions and so on, hence the parameters of the procedure.

This reviewer also added a few additional minor comments in the pdf.

These are all minor comments but please consider them in your final submission

Kind regards
Ann

The manuscript has significantly improved but still a few aspects need further improvement including some textual corrections

Dear Tasnim

Thank you for having done the corrections as suggested before. There are still a few technical aspects that need correction.

- in your abstract you mention 60000 amphipods while it were only 6000
- line 140: change to deep-sea risk assessment
- remove headers from Fig 2, Fig 3 and Fig 6
- Line 247 remove 'was' to become '...basins using...'
- Line 338-339: change to 'there is no statistically significant correlation.'
-Line 339 ANOSIM is NOT used for correlations. How calculated?
-Line 576: avoid the word clustering since not supported by SIMPROF
- Line 585: avoid the word connectivity. Rephrase as: 'It is likely that some of the 8 shared species between the two basins are cryptic species, which will be tested by ongoing molecular research'