Hi, after a review I received an observation like this "the results of ABGD shows a high level of uncertainty and of ambiguity: choosing a different prior intraspecific divergence from Appendix 1 would give a different number of species, from 20 to 80." and I have no clear idea how to reply it. Somebody could help me?
Attached is my calculation and results with a dataset of 776 specimens.
Hola Manuel!
Really the reviewer comment is correct... Any appelations to "barcoding gap" (and so on) are helpless, because the diversity of sutuations in nature is endless. But I do not understand, what the reviewer affraid of? You can say in answer that his/her comment is correct... And it will be the good answer...
All the best!
Alexey
Hi Manuel,
ABGD is just a modelling approach for automatic delimitation of MOTUs. These MOTUs may be species-level units, and may be not. Another approach, e.g., the Bayesian PTP model http://species.h-its.org/, would likely reveal another set of MOTUs. The number of MOTUs in a model may differ depending on the number of haplotypes in the data set, distances between them, etc. So, any such an approach would give a model, but not the set of true species. With respect to these suggestions, the referee comment seems to be correct, and I concur with Alexey's answer. I assume that you could highlight that you use MOTUs, which may be of the species level, and that these MOTUs were separated by using certain modeling approach (i.e., ABGD). Your number of "species" is actually a number of MOTUs in accordance with the most probable solution of your model.
Note that the COI barcoding threshold differs in different taxa, e.g., ca. 5% in freshwater gastropods, 2.5-3.0% in moths and butterflies, but these estimations are not axiom, they are approximate marks on the difficult way.
Best wishes,
Ivan
Barcoding (or delimiting species by any genetic gap) is merely a heuristic device. MOTU's are just hypotheses. You need to find robust autapomorphies, preferably morphological, before describing a new sp.
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