Dear authors,

Thank you for the the point-by-point responses to the reviewers' comments. Please send us a revised version of your manuscript. I will ask the reviewers to evaluate your manuscript again. Thank you.

Best regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor

Dear Dr. Zhou,

We have received two reviews of your revised manuscript. The referee #1 and I recognized that the authors made a significant effort to improve the contents of your paper. However, both the referee #1 and a new reviewer have claimed that your manuscript should be modified further (see the file attached). So please make a further revised manuscript, as well as point-by-point responses to the reviewers' comments.

Thank you for your nice effort.

Kind regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor

Dear Authors,

We have just received two reviews of your revised manuscript. There are still several concerns from the reviewers (see the PDF file attached), so we would like to request you to revise your manuscript again following their comments and suggestions. We look forward to your further revised manuscript with point-by-point responses to the comments from the reviewers.

Thank you for your nice effort.

Kind regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor

Dear Authors,

Thank you for your revised manuscript. Below is a review of it from the referee. I also agree to the comment and we need to keep the quality of the journal. So please consider to include the confidence intervals of the estimates determined with the dilution technique into the paper.

Thank you again for your nice effort to improve the manuscript.

Best regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor

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It is clear that the authors have not made the efforts (e.g. carefully calculating the confidence intervals of µ, m and m/µ) to fully address my concern. But maybe this is beyond the capacity of the authors. I still think it is worthwhile to obtain a more accurate estimate of µ, m and m/µ of different size classes in different seasons.

Dear Authors,

We are very pleased to inform you that your manuscript has just been accepted for publication in the journal Biogeosciences. Thank you very much for your wonderful effort to improve the manuscript.

Kind regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor