Earthworm and Food Interactions on Bioaccumulation and Disappearance in Soil of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons: Studies on Phenanthrene and Fluoranthene

Crude Oil Contaminant and Bio-remediation using Brewery Mash and Earthworm (Nsukkadrilus mbae.) a Consortium to Cleaning-up and Restoring Soil Fertility Potentials

“…Table 3 showed the effect of number of earthworms on PAHs degradation capacity of earthworms in the crude oil contaminated soil, which followed the same trend with Tables 4 and 5 which shows the effect of earthworm's numbers on PAHs degradation in crude oil contaminated soil amended with brewery mash. The significant reduction in PAHs (p<0.05) in all treatments and especially the 86-94% loss in the combined earthworms and mash-treated group corroborated the assertion that earthworms through their biological and physical activities enhanced PAHs degradation in crude oil-polluted soils as reported by Schaefer [24] and Ma [27]. There was a significant increase (P<0.05) in percent nitrogen in the earthworms and mash treatments, and a decrease in C/N ratio (an index of increased soil fertility) if we resort to Table 1.…”

“…The significant decrease in hydrocarbons (TPH and PAH) (p<0.05) and percent organic carbon (% OC), the significant increase (p<0.05) in microbial respiration (MCR) were potentially promoted in the earthworm treatment. Table 2 shows the Effect of number of earthworms on TPH degradation in the crude oil-contaminated soil, on day 0, 14 and 28 [26,29], portray similar results which states that physical actions (aeration, input of nutritionally-rich matters, bioturbation and increased soil surface area where responsible for microbial interaction), as previously reported by [27,29,31,33,34]. The 88-94% TPH level of reduction in the combined earthworms and mash treatment was in good agreement with the results published by [35], but was contrary only to the mixture ratio, where he concluded that such degree of reduction is obtainable only when 50% additive (compost) is used.…”

“…Earthworms enhance oil degradation through enhanced oxidation processes due to the aeration resulting from burrowing activities; increased microbial availability of hydrocarbons due to bioturbation and enhanced microbial activity [25]. A number of encouraging studies have, highlighted the potential of earthworms uses to promoting hydrocarbons contaminants from soil [26][27][28][29][30][31].…”

Toxicity and bioaccumulation of ethofumesate enantiomers in earthworm Eisenia fetida

“…One possible is induction of active excretion by the worm (Reinecke and Nash, 1984). The second possible is an increase of sorption in soil with exposure time increased, which caused bioavailability to decline (Ma et al, 1995). A gradual reduction in the concentration of ethofumesate enantiomers in the soil during the experiment is the third possible explanation for this observation.…”

Developing earthworm bioconcentration factors of nitrogen-based compounds for predicting environmentally significant parameters for new munition compounds in soil

“…This was necessary because experimental evidence suggests that the dissolved form of a chemical in interstitial or porewater may control its bioaccumulation from soils or sediments. Several studies demonstrated that the bioavailability of many organic compounds, including chlorophenols (Van Gestel and Ma, 1988) polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and linear alkylbenzenes (LABs) (Lamoureux and Brownawell 1999;Ma et al, 1995) was dependent on its concentration in the interstitial aqueous phase. Furthermore, studies by Savard et al (2010) have shown that chemicals may be applied at loading rates that exceed aqueous solubility, which resulted in distorted BSAF values.…”