p. 11, line 3 of conclusions: This paraphrasing inaccurately reflects the letter, spirit, and intent of what I (Shelley (2007) said and is therefore attributable to the present authors, not me, and I definitely did not state or suggest a time frame, as indicated by the author’s use of the word, "soon." The actual concluding statement of my contribution, “…the day when the Diplopoda can discard (present emphasis) the sobriquet of ‘poorly known’ looms on the horizon,” was intended as a positive, metaphorical conclusion to the paper rather than a statement of factual accuracy to be stretched, dissected, and hyper-analyzed. The last four words comprise a relatively common “figure-of-speech” that held merit with the undeniably substantial advancements that had taken place since 1971, and provided a positive, upbeat, stylistic conclusion to the paper. It is neither hair-splitting nor semantics to point out that the conditional, “can discard” (it will happen if conditions are met), does not equate with the absolute, “will soon be able to discard” (it will happen “soon” regardless of conditions). The fact that something “looms on the horizon,” like the first shadow of the Rocky Mountain Front after hours of driving across the plains of Kansas, only means that it is closer and that what might previously have seemed out-of-reach is now definitely attainable. Doing so, however, requires continued work and effort; one still has to drive more hours through the plains of eastern Colorado to reach the Rockies themselves. Reaching an objective is no more guaranteed when it “looms on the horizon” than before it could be detected, but the fact that it does provides incentive to continue advancing. If one stops when a result or objective is visible on the horizon, it will never be reached; if the pace of advancement slows, more time will be required to attain it. I meant exactly what I said; stretching this metaphor and implying otherwise is inappropriate and inaccurate. The present authors therefore “own” the wording, “will soon be able to discard.”

Last paragraph of the paper. With my actual statement and its intent now present, the personalized “symbolic victory” over myself, which was based on a false premise, is negated.


Comment re the last full paragraph on p. 9. The tersely dismissive sentence, “However, the work lacks any statistical or phylogenetic analyses,” is both selective and incomplete. The authors report methodological limitations without balancing it with the facts that these were openly acknowledged upfront, at the outset, and informing readers that ours’ was intentionally an entirely different kind of study. Readers are therefore left to draw their own, uninformed and probably negative, conclusions about our contribution. Did the authors miss our clear statement in paragraph one, “We therefore adopt a novel perspective by treating millipeds as geographic entities and departing from taxonomy, systematics, and cladistics in the strict senses….”? Why didn’t they further acknowledge our statement in paragraph four, “our map groupings are also purely geographic; they are not intended to be phylogenetic and should not be misconstrued as such”? In a recent contribution on Callipodida, Stoev & Enghoff (2011, ZooKeys, 90:33) acknowledged our “explicitly not phylogeny-based narrative,” why didn’t the present authors also do so to not mislead readers? We consciously intended a purely geographic treatment, as opposed to phylogenetic, anatomical, physiological, ecological, ethological, etc., and stated and provided exactly that. We did precisely what we said we would do, mapped ordinal and higher-level indigenous distributions and analyzed resultant geographic patterns. Our work deliberately contained only narrative and maps; it lacked numerical data. Our data were the multitude of localities in two centuries of published literature. Without a hint of subjectivity, we painstakingly plotted localities on maps to assess distributions and examine emerging patterns, and the distributions we depict are undeniably real. This was a large task that took >2½ years; why didn’t the authors fairly acknowledge the time factor that was clearly stated in paragraph five? As “senior citizens” approaching our statistical lifespans, our perspectives on time and life differ from those of middle-agers; we wanted to finish and publish the work in our lifetimes! Perhaps this reality is one that the authors have not yet considered, but in truth, tomorrow is not guaranteed to anyone, even the young. The authors do not allude even obliquely to any of these factors. They provide nothing to dissuade readers from erroneously concluding that we did not bother to analyze numerical data, that we simply ignored phylogeny, or that our study was subjective, since they specifially state that the recommended software prograns are “means to objectively (present emphasis) assess” these issues. We state “up front” our scope, purpose, intent, and limitations; how could the authors fail to mention any of these for the benefit of unknowing readers?

The authors also mention nothing positive about our 134 pp. contribution, not even as balance, so we can only assume that they found none and did not consider our study useful or worthwhile. This sometimes happens, but we did not claim our work to be perfect nor that it constituted the final word on these topics. Our study does, however, represent a genuine attempt to address an uninvestigated aspect of diplopodology and glean potential insights into the organisms. To balance their terse dismissal, the authors could have fairly credited our study, the first of its kind on Diplopoda, for providing the first solidly based hypotheses on taxon origins and timings, thus providing a foundational base line for future refinements, and we even mention the latter in our concluding paragraph. Why didn’t they do so? Documented distributions and tectonic events are beyond dispute, and we think combining these advanced diplopodology by providing hypotheses on which persons who possess the computer, mathematical, and statistical skills that we lack can now build. Geography is a tool that yields insight into these poorly vagile soil arthropods. It is simple to employ and not technological, but why ignore any tool, simple or complex, that enhances understanding of a great zoological class? Why ignore the insights that geography yields and the lessons it teaches? It also does not require laborious hours drafting grant proposals to support lavish and costly equipment, only a stack of maps that can be printed on any printer or copy machine. Geography is thus ideal for cash-strapped institutions like ours whose budgets have been depleted in today’s economy.