Overall the paper is well written and the analysis thoroughly performed. The public access to VLMs is an exciting area of research for science as a whole. While informative, my primary concern is at the level of novelty associated with the work in regards to the standards typically upheld by Methods in Ecology and Evolution. I leave the decision of this primarily up the to editor.

1. Include references to early works showing high classification results
2. List the six vision models here.
3. It would be worth noting here the vastness of possible prompts and standardized approaches for repetition is needed.
4. Which version of clip? There is clip-base, clip-large, clip-large-336. Be specific
5. Same with SigLIP, there’s 384, 224, 256, etc.
6. Reference for “more complex reasoning”
7. How did you conclude to use this prompt specifically? Were there experimental results of other formulations?
8. How do you calculate the similarity scores?
9. Similarly, how did you come to this prompt?
10. ECE? Define
11. Start this section with a brief sentence about why Diel activity patterns are relevant.
12. This paragraph could be more succinct