Comments(1)

Molecular Ecology Discussion group

Joseph Hughes   (03 August 2009)  University of Glasgow

Elegant approach considering the difficulty in studying these types of systems in the wild. Indeed, the odds of finding these results with a low number of pairs and small number of loci is quite small and it is therefore surprising and interesting but the authors should discuss the biological relevance of the marginal (yet significant) differences reported in Table 1.
After this point, the paper is very weak for the following reasons:
Relatedness is not included in the model (Table 2), genetic similarity between individuals could have been included and would have been a more powerful approach and provided more convincing evidence.
The statistics in Table 2 are weak. If the two way interaction between rank and heterozygosity is not significant, it is not justifiable to interpret 3-way interactions. It is also odd not to present the main effects separately.
Marc Stift
Joseph Hughes
on behalf of the MEG discussion group

Competing interests

None declared

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