Pests can cause many problems for people, plants, and property. They may spread disease through their droppings or by contaminating food or water supplies. They can also damage property by eating or chewing structures or by destroying crops. Contact Bakersfield Pest Control now!
Fortunately, there are many ways to prevent or control pests. These methods include physical controls (traps, barriers), biological controls, and chemical controls.
Insect pests cost billions of dollars annually in crop, livestock, and building losses. While only a tiny fraction of insects are considered pest species, their populations rise and fall with many variables, including season, weather, interspecific competition, and food availability. Pests occur everywhere and affect every living thing to varying degrees. The most common pests include flies, mosquitoes, ticks, ants, and rodents. These pests can cause direct damage to crops or structures and, through disease transmission, impact human health.
Pest control can involve any method used to reduce the number of pests. Pest control methods include monitoring, trapping, physical removal, and chemical treatment. Monitoring helps identify pest problems before they become widespread. Monitoring also provides information on the speed and direction of pest movement, which is useful to determine when to apply pest management tactics.
Data from AHS surveys show that the likelihood of seeing a pest increases with the severity of structural problems in homes. For example, those living in a house with a sagging roof are 3.9 times more likely to report roach sightings than those who live in a house without one. Similarly, those who live in homes with outside walls that slope, lean, or buckle are 5.6 times more likely to report seeing rodents than those living in a home with stable walls. Neighborhood characteristics are also important predictors of pests. Residents living within half a block of an open landfill or in neighborhoods with high rates of abandoned buildings are likelier to report pests than those residing in well-maintained areas.
The frequency of pest sightings varies across the country, with the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area having the lowest percentage of households reporting roaches and the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land metropolitan area having the highest. The Northeast and Midwest are more likely to have a higher percentage of people who say they often see pests in their homes. Residents in these regions also are more likely to report noticing cockroaches, lizards and geckos.
A successful cultural pest management program involves minimizing the availability of food and water to the target insect through proper sanitation practices. This includes maintaining clean work and storage facilities, keeping equipment and materials off the ground, and fixing leaky pipes to limit sources of water. It also involves applying pesticides at the right time in a crop production cycle to minimize potential economic loss due to insect damage.
Prevention
The goal of prevention is to keep pest populations below a level that causes unacceptable harm. This is the first step in IPM, and it often involves finding ways to make a location less desirable to pests. It can also involve altering the environment so that pests have fewer resources to exploit. For example, clogged gutters may provide places for rodents to hide, and a humid bathroom can invite spiders into homes.
Prevention strategies can include sealing entry points, properly disposing of trash, trimming bushes and other plants away from buildings, and regular inspections by a professional. Preventing the spread of disease organisms between plants also can be accomplished through careful handling of plant material and ensuring that tools and equipment are thoroughly cleaned after each use.
When a pest problem exists, it is important to understand its cause and to make decisions about control based on that understanding. For example, a few wasps in the garden every now and then probably don’t warrant action; however, a large influx of wasps on an unprotected property probably is a problem that requires treatment. Threshold-based decision-making empowers professionals to act when it is most needed, and it reduces the need for unnecessary chemical treatments.
Educating customers on preventive steps they can take is important. Many pests are able to enter homes and other structures through tiny cracks and crevices, and proper caulking can significantly reduce the number of pests entering homes or offices. Instructing them to remove clutter and stacks of newspapers, magazines or cardboard, which can provide hiding places for pests, also helps to limit their numbers.
Identifying the pest species is also important, as some are beneficial and can help to control pest populations. It is also important to understand the life cycle of the pest in order to select a control measure that will target its most vulnerable stage. This will save time and money, and it will decrease the likelihood of off-target damage. Similarly, using a natural enemy of the pest instead of a pesticide can sometimes be more effective, and it will minimize the use of chemicals that are harmful to people and other wildlife.
Suppression
The goal of suppression is to limit the damage that pests cause. The strategies for suppressing pests vary with the situation and the environmental conditions that encourage them to be there in the first place. Prevention is generally a more realistic goal than eradication, especially in outdoor situations where recurrence is likely. In indoor situations, eradication is more feasible, as are limiting the number of pests that are allowed to survive.
In addition to reducing the availability of food and shelter for pests, limiting access to water and other resources can prevent their reproduction and spread. Other features of the environment can help to control pest populations, including barriers such as mountains and lakes that restrict the movement of some species; natural or human-made barriers such as fences or dikes that separate a crop from other land use, often for livestock feed and irrigation systems; and predators such as birds and mammals that eat pests.
Predator control involves traps and snares that kill or capture pests, as well as sprays to disrupt their breathing, preventing them from reaching their target, such as cockroaches in a kitchen. Parasitoids, which live as parasites attached to the outside of another insect or vertebrate and attack it from within, are also part of predator control. Hermetic storage, which seals a food in a container so that natural respiration of the pest and the surrounding soil is deprived of oxygen, is another method of control. Juvenile hormones and pheromones, which are naturally produced chemicals that change the behavior of the host organism to make it less attractive to the pests, are also used in pest control.
Insecticides can be effective at controlling pests when a targeted approach is taken and the right product is used in the correct way. A good understanding of the pest’s biology, life cycle, and ecology is needed to select the best type of insecticide or rodenticide for a particular problem. This knowledge will help to reduce off-target impacts, which are the result of chemicals that are applied in areas where they don’t belong and can harm beneficial insects or animals as well as humans.
Eradication
Eradication strategies are designed to eliminate a pest from an area. They require intensive and ongoing efforts at local, community, national, regional and international levels to monitor and eradicate pest populations. Eradication differs from control in that the objective is to remove the microbe completely and prevent its reintroduction. Successful eradication requires that the pest’s reproductive rate be kept below 1.0, a level which depends on factors such as the density of the vector, intermediary hosts and humans. In addition, there must be adequate surveillance to ensure that the target population of susceptible individuals is effectively identified and targeted for prophylactic measures.
Chemical Chemical pest controls are the fastest ways to reduce a population and may offer the only option for some pests. These solutions include repellents, which keep pests away, and insecticides, which kill insects. Many chemical solutions have the potential to harm people and the environment upon exposure, so caution should be taken when using them. They also often lose their effect over time, so repeated applications are required.
Physical
Traps and netting are examples of physical pest control methods. Other physical solutions include nematodes, which are microscopic worms that live in the soil and can be sprayed to destroy pests such as fleas, grubs, aphids and cockroaches. They work similarly to parasitoids but on a larger scale. Some types, such as the roach-eating nematode Steinernema carpocapsae, have been developed to target specific pests and have the advantage of being less toxic to humans and the environment than conventional chemical pesticides.
Biological
Some pests, including some stored materials in libraries and archives, are protected by natural enemies such as predators or parasitoids. Other species, such as fungi and bacteria, can be used to modify the behavior of pests or to create sterile individuals.
The word “eradicate” comes from the Latin verb eradicare, which means to pull up by the roots. This figurative meaning is reflected in the fact that many pests are able to survive by burrowing underground or hiding in crevices, even when the population of natural enemies is high.
