Impact of soil metals on earthworm communities from the perspectives of earthworm ecotypes and metal bioaccumulation

Highlights: • Impact of metals on earthworm community was determined through a field survey. • Earthworm of different ecotypes showed diverse responses to soil metals. • Earthworms showed species-specific features of metal bioaccumulation. • Soil pH, nitrogen and cadmium were major factors influence earthworm community. • Metaphire californica could be a model organism to study cadmium resistance. The current study elucidates the impact of soil metal contamination on earthworm communities at the ecotype level. A total of 292 earthworms belonging to 13 species were collected in metal-contaminated soils from Wanshou (WSC), Daxing (DXC) and Lupu (LPC) plots (1.40–6.60, 29.4–126, 251–336 and 91.9–109 mg/kg for soil Cd, Cu, Zn and Pb, respectively) in Hunan Province, southern China. The results showed that the total earthworm density and biomass significantly decreased along the increasing metal-contaminated gradient while epigeic earthworms became more dominant than anecic and endogeic earthworms. Redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that soil pH, total nitrogen and Cd concentration were the primary factors influencing earthworm communities, explaining 33.7%, 29.1% and 26.7% of the total variance, respectively. In addition, epigeic earthworm Metaphire californica bioaccumulated more Cd (0.27–0.60 mmol/kg), while endogeic earthworm Amynthas hupeiensis and anecic earthworm Amynthas asacceus bioaccumulated more Cu (0.55–1.62 mmol/kg) and Zn (2.86–6.46 mmol/kg) from soil, respectively, which were related to their habit soils and showed the species-specific bioaccumulation features. Our study discovered the diverse responses of earthworm ecotypes to metal contamination and their specific features of metal bioaccumulation, provide insight for soil risk assessments and for biodiversity conservation from a niche partitioning perspective.