Letter to the Editor

Dear Prof Dr Paul De Barro,

In the issue of Bulletin of Entomological Research, First View, Published online: 25 September 2017, pp. 1–8 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S000748531700092X), there were obvious errors in the article published by Jaleel et al. (2017). I submitted a letter to the editor on 24 October 2017. After 2 months, I sent a several-mails to the editorial office regarding their decision. On 13 January 2018, the editorial office responded to my e-mail as ‘Since receiving your letter to the Editor on the Jaleel manuscript we been asked to publish a corrigendum by the authors as they noticed some errors in their work. That is being prepared at the current time and it may mean that your comments may change. As soon as we have published the corrigendum we will send you a decision on your letter. Apologies for the delay’. On 9 February 2018, I received the Corrigendum (Jaleel et al., 2018) from the editorial office. The authors corrected the errors of equation (1) and the reference citation; they also added two references they missed. Unfortunately, there are still important errors in their paper. I believe it is important to publish another Corrigendum to provide entomologists with the correct information.

1. (1) In the Discussion, the authors wrote ‘According to life tables, traits of R ₀ less than 1 and r greater than 0 result in a mean population increase’ (right column below table 4). This statement is incorrect. According to life table theory (Lotka, 1913, Lewis, 1942), if R ₀ is less than 1, r must be <0. That statement should be corrected to ‘According to life table theory, traits of R ₀ greater than 1 and r greater than 0 result in …. population increase’.

2. (2) In table 2, the authors reported death rates of 8.93, 5.00, 4.90, and 5.05 for B. correcta, B. dorsalis, B. cucurbitae, and B. tau, respectively. These death rates are much higher than the birth and survival rates. If the death rates are greater than the sum of the birth and survival rates, the intrinsic rate will be negative. The death rate data are obviously incorrect. I believe the authors did not notice that the death rates were listed in scientific notation, the value 8.93 must actually be 8.93E-03 (i.e., 8.93 × 10⁻⁰³) or 8.93E-04 (i.e., 8.93 × 10⁻⁰⁴).

3. (3) In the footnote of table 1, the ‘bootstrap test’ should be corrected to ‘paired bootstrap test’. In table 2, the parameters R should be corrected to ‘r’, and Λ should be corrected to λ.

4. (4) The correct citation of TWOSEX program should be ‘Chi (2017) TWOSEX-MSChart: A computer program for the age-stage, two-sex life table analysis. National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. http://140.120.197.173/ecology/Download/TWOSEX-MSChart.rar.’

5. (5) The authors wrote ’Body weights of immature and mature stages of each fly were measured on an electronic weighing balance (Chi & Su, 2006; Singh et al., 2010)’. However, Chi & Su (2006) did not measure body weight.

6. (6) The authors wrote in Acknowledgments ‘The authors are thankful to Prof Dr Hsin Chi and Muhammad Nadir Naqqash from the Department of Plant Production and Technologies, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Technologies, Ömer Halisdemir Üniversity, for two-sex life table analysis.’ Because I did not analyze their data nor comment on their manuscript, the authors should not list me in the Acknowledgments. Proper citation of my program would be sufficient.

Because it is important to provide accurate scientific information and correct references for readers of the Bulletin of Entomological Research, I suggest that the editor should ask the authors to prepare a second corrigendum.

Sincerely yours,

Hsin Chi