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Combined toxicity of imidacloprid and three insecticides to the earthworm, Eisenia fetida (Annelida, Oligochaeta)

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Abstract

Although the earthworm Eisenia fetida has been used in many ecotoxicological studies in recent years, most of these studies have only focused on assessing the effects of individual insecticides. In the present study, we aimed to compare the individual and combined toxic effects of imidacloprid and three insecticides (phoxim, chlorpyrifos, and lambda-cyhalothrin) on E. fetida. We showed that imidacloprid had the highest intrinsic toxicity to the worms in filter paper contact test, followed by phoxim and lambda-cyhalothrin, while the least toxicity was found from chlorpyrifos. Moreover, 14-day soil toxicity test revealed that the highest toxicity was still detected for imidacloprid with an LC50 value of 2.82 (2.61∼3.17) mg a.i. kg−1 dry weight (DW), followed by chlorpyrifos with an LC50 value of 384.9 (353.5∼440.3) mg a.i. kg−1 DW. Meanwhile, a relatively less toxicity was found for lambda-cyhalothrin with an LC50 value of 560.3 (475.9∼718.5) mg a.i. kg−1 DW, while the lowest toxicity to E. fetida was observed for phoxim with an LC50 value of 901.5 (821.3∼1017) mg a.i. kg−1 DW. In addition, significant synergistic responses were found from the ternary mixture of imidacloprid-phoxim-lambda-cyhalothrin and quaternary mixture of imidacloprid-phoxim-chlorpyrifos-lambda-cyhalothrin in both bioassay systems. Therefore, our findings highlighted that the simultaneous presence of several insecticides in the soil environment might lead to increased toxicity, resulting in serious damage to the nontarget organisms compared with individual insecticides.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the help provided by Weihua Yu and Lizhi Yang (Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences) in the laboratorial experiments. The study was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31401767 and 31572028), Zhejiang Province Key Research and Development Project (Grant No. 2015C02043), and Zhejiang Province Major Bidding Project (Grant No. 2014C02002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory Breeding Base for Zhejiang Sustainable Pest and Disease Control/Key Laboratory for Pesticide Residue Detection of Ministry of Agriculture/Laboratory (Hangzhou) for Risk Assessment of Agricultural Products of Ministry of Agriculture, Institute of Quality and Standard for Agro-products, Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310021, China

    Tao Cang, Guiling Yang, Lu Lv, Leiming Cai, Qiang Wang & Yanhua Wang

  2. Institute for the Control of Agrochemicals of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, 310020, China

    Dejiang Dai

  3. Quality Supervision Division, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Agriculture, Hangzhou, 310020, China

    Yijun Yu

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  1. Tao Cang
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  2. Dejiang Dai
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  3. Guiling Yang
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  4. Yijun Yu
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  8. Yanhua Wang
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Correspondence to Yanhua Wang.

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Cang, T., Dai, D., Yang, G. et al. Combined toxicity of imidacloprid and three insecticides to the earthworm, Eisenia fetida (Annelida, Oligochaeta). Environ Sci Pollut Res 24, 8722–8730 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-8627-z

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