Minor concerns:
- Figure 5 is a very clear and informative figure. As readers, we can easily observe that the ID50 decreases two-fold in primed offspring compared to the control. In addition, the anomalous increase in P5 infection is also straightforward. It is more difficult to see these trends in Figure 2. The authors might consider including ID50 in this plot as well or to remove it completely.
- Although it is very clear that the ID50 changes between treatments, it is difficult for us to put the change in context without more discussion. Is it a big change? How does the change compare to studies in other model organisms?
- We recognize that the model used in this study is a central strong point of the work. However, since we were not previously familiar with frailty models, it would be helpful to have more discussion about why this model was chosen and which alternatives were considered.
- Since this work focused on disentangling specific and unspecific priming, it would be really nice to see the relative significance of specific and unspecific effects, especially in a figure.
- The authors mention the applicability of this study to the experimental assessment of vaccines, but the connection feels a little tenuous because vaccines are generally applied to vertebrates and vertebrate and invertebrates have very different immune responses. The authors may consider discussing these differences in more detail and providing a few concrete examples of how this study relates to vaccine assessment.
- The authors state that this study is not concerned with the molecular methods involved in immune priming, but it may still be beneficial to discuss molecular mechanisms in relation to the results found here. Perhaps the mechanisms for immune priming in invertebrates are not specific enough to differentiate between strains and would therefore support the results found in this study.
- The authors refer to Ben-Ami et al., 2008, 2010 as "we". Please consider that this might not be common practice.
- It would be helpful if the authors discuss future directions for this work. We are really interested to see where they feel this work should go next!
We thoroughly enjoyed reading and discussing this preprint in our journal club and thank the authors for posting their work on the bioRxiv. We sincerely hope that our comments are helpful and we look forward to seeing the final published version!
Best wishes,
The OIST Ecology and Evolution Preprint Journal Club