Interactive comment on “Determination of the metabolically active fraction of benthic foraminifera by means of Fluorescent in situ Hybridization (FISH)” by C. Borrelli et al

December, 7 2010 Dear Dr. Middelburg, For responding to the reviewers’ comments, we would like first to provide a brief description of the FISH technique and explain the rationale behind its application. We apologize for not having illustrated better these issues in a previous version of the manuscript. We hope that this will allow to better understand the advantages of this technique, when compared with other methods currently utilized for quantifying live and active foraminifera. As stated by Referee #2, there are no perfect methods for differentiating between live and dead foraminifera, and all