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Interactions between microplastics and soil fauna: A critical review
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This review summarizes how microplastics affect soil animals like earthworms and nematodes, which play crucial roles in maintaining healthy soil. Microplastics can harm these organisms through ingestion, tissue damage, oxidative stress, and disruption of their gut bacteria, reducing their ability to decompose organic matter and cycle nutrients. In turn, soil animals can break down and spread microplastics through the soil, potentially transferring them up the food chain to animals and humans.
Microplastics (MPs) are emerging contaminants that cause diverse impacts on soil ecosystems. As integral members of soil food webs, soil fauna exert key ecological functions such as litter decomposition, nutrient cycling, and energy flow. MPs may damage soil fauna and their ecological functions, posing ecological and health risks. Meanwhile, soil fauna can act on MPs. Hereby, we aim to summarize the interactions between MPs and soil fauna. This article first introduces the source, occurrence and characteristics of MPs in soils, and then highlights the interactions between MPs and soil fauna, particularly earthworms and nematodes. MPs can cause negative impacts on the growth, reproduction, lifespan, and survival of soil fauna, via diverse toxicity mechanisms such as ingestion and bioaccumulation, histopathological damage, oxidative stress, DNA damage, genotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, neurotoxicity, metabolic disorders, and gut microbiota dysbiosis. MPs can also interact with other contaminants to produce combined toxicity to soil fauna. In turn, soil fauna can contribute to the formation and breakdown of MPs, alter the migration of MPs in soil, and even transfer accumulated MPs to higher trophic levels. Finally, given the large knowledge gap regarding the interaction of soil fauna and MPs, several future research priorities are recommended.
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This systematic review examines how microplastics in soil affect earthworms, springtails, mites, and other soil-dwelling creatures that are essential for healthy soil. The impacts are highly variable and depend on the type of plastic, particle size, and soil conditions, making broad conclusions difficult. The review identifies critical knowledge gaps, noting that most studies use unrealistically high microplastic concentrations, and calls for research at levels that match actual field conditions.
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