Pests can damage crops, homes, and gardens. They can also harm the environment, pets, and people.
Prevention can include things like pest-proofing. It can also involve introducing the pest’s natural enemies, such as predators and pathogens. Pheromones that confuse male insects or juvenile hormones can also reduce pest numbers. Contact Pest Control O’fallon MO now!
Pests like roaches, rodents, and wood-destroying organisms are easier to control if they cannot infiltrate your establishment. You can significantly reduce their numbers and activity by depriving them of food, water, and shelter.
Preventative measures can be as simple as keeping the yard tidy and removing clutter, giving pests places to hide or breed. Regularly trim shrubbery, manage standing water, and keep trash in tightly covered garbage cans. Similarly, the condition of your building’s interior can also influence the presence of pests. Clutter gives pests hiding and breeding places, while a poorly maintained kitchen or bathroom can provide an attractive environment for pests. Regular cleaning, particularly in kitchens and bathrooms, can discourage pests and prevent their movement into other areas.
Physical traps, netting, and decoys are a few examples of preventative pest control methods that require no handling or disposal and are generally safer to use than chemical controls. However, these methods are only effective for small infestations and only serve to deter rather than kill pests.
Other preventative measures include caulking cracks and crevices, which can prevent pests from entering a home or business; storing food in sealed plastic or glass containers; securing trash bins and keeping them covered; and preventing access to sources of moisture, such as through the roof and vents. Educating yourself on the life cycles of particular pests, their preferred feeding sites and nesting grounds can help you to identify potential problems and act before they become unmanageable.
A combination of preventative and eradication controls is typically the best way to control pests. These approaches may include natural methods (inviting predators and pheromone traps) or pest-repellent products, which are a less invasive alternative to chemical solutions.
A professional Pest Control Operator can help you implement a preventative strategy that is specific to your property, its inhabitants and your facility’s operations. They will also be able to recommend and apply the best methods for managing pests that have already invaded your space. The more information you can provide your PCO, including sightings of pests and indicators that they are present, the more successful your treatment will be.
Suppression Measures
Pests can be controlled in a variety of ways. Preventative measures can keep a pest from becoming a problem; suppression reduces the numbers or damage to an acceptable level; and eradication destroys the pests. Ideally, a pest management strategy will include preventative and suppression tactics that do as little harm as possible to the environment and people.
Insects can be infected by bacteria, fungi, protozoans and viruses that cause disease, slowing their growth or killing them. In addition, some insects have natural enemies such as predators and parasitoids that limit their populations. For example, tsetse flies (Glossina) in Africa maim and kill livestock and cost farmers millions each year, but the disease nagana caused by these flies can be prevented by using drugs or parasiticides.
Cultural control is a broad category of practices that disrupt the normal relationship between the pest and the cultivated plant to make it less likely for the pest to survive, grow or reproduce. Plowing, crop rotation, varying time of planting or harvesting, tillage equipment cleaning, mulching, and other cultural practices deprive pests of their comfortable habitats or block their movements. Some cultural controls can also affect the climate by reducing humidity or altering light levels.
Chemical control includes the use of insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and plant hormones. Chemical control is effective for a limited number of pests under certain conditions, but it can cause environmental and human health problems if misused or overused. IPM emphasizes the use of chemical control in conjunction with non-chemical control techniques, and stresses the selection of the safest compounds, formulations and application methods.
PCOs can be exposed to diseases through contact with pests and should always wear protective clothing when conducting pest inspections. For example, cockroach faeces, saliva and cuticles contain substances that trigger asthma in humans. Similarly, spider mites can trigger hay fever in susceptible individuals. Moreover, the pheromones used to attract insect pests to swarm traps may also act as a sexually transmitted disease vector for HIV/AIDS virus. The CDC recommends that PCOs enlist the help of a trained steward or another professional to perform HIV/AIDS testing of themselves and their partners prior to any sexual contact in order to minimize the risk of infection.
Eradication Measures
A pest control program should involve preventive measures when possible, suppression techniques to reduce pest numbers and damage to an acceptable level, and eradication methods when necessary. Preventive measures include regularly cleaning areas where pests like to live, removing weeds and other materials that promote their development and spread, and storing food in airtight containers. These actions will help prevent pests from becoming an infestation in the first place or spreading to other parts of the garden.
Eradication measures include spraying pesticides to kill or inhibit the growth of pest populations. These chemicals can be natural products, synthesized chemically to mimic them, or entirely synthetic. They can be used to kill a specific pest or to prevent it from mating with its potential predators or parasitoids, or they can block insect feeding and development by blocking hormones such as pheromones and juvenile hormones.
Biological controls are organisms, such as birds, reptiles, fish or mammals, that feed on or kill plant-eating pests and help control their numbers. Insect pathogens also suppress pest populations by attacking them directly. These disease organisms are bacteria, fungi, or protozoans that reduce the rate of an insect’s growth and reproduction or cause it to die.
In addition, natural enemies of pests can be introduced into an area to supplement the population of predators and parasitoids that would otherwise naturally occur there. Successful introductions of new natural enemies can result in a significant reduction of pest populations, but they do not usually achieve eradication as they do not always have enough time to grow to the point of balancing out with the population of the pest they are controlling.
Some examples of successful biological control are the introduction of predatory beetles into greenhouses to eliminate cabbage maggot; the use of nematodes in gardens to reduce populations of grasshoppers and other pests that live by eating roots; the planting of trap crops near a crop to be protected, such as squash planted next to cucumbers to attract pickleworms which can then be destroyed; and the releasing of sterile male mosquitoes or pheromones to prevent mosquito infestations.
Monitoring
Pest identification is the first step in any pest control strategy. This process allows you to determine what the problem is, whether it is a nuisance or serious, and how to handle it. It also helps you set action thresholds. Thresholds are the levels of pest populations at which you must begin control tactics to prevent unacceptable damage or injury. The use of thresholds can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of pest control strategies.
Many pests are able to reproduce and grow without being controlled, and they will not cease reproducing until the population becomes too large. Once this happens, suppression and eradication measures may be necessary to reduce the pest population back to an acceptable level.
Monitoring is the process of inspecting or scouting to find out what kind of pests are present and how much damage they are causing. In horticulture and agriculture, population estimates are often made relative to some constant, such as square foot or acre. Monitoring can involve inspection using human eyes, but more commonly is a combination of a visual check and the use of traps and other devices that are designed to lure pests into them. Some of these devices are based on physical barriers, such as light or pheromone attractants (chemical lures), while others are more passive, such as pitfall traps. (See Fig. 8.2.)
Natural forces that influence pest populations include climate, natural enemies, overwintering sites, the availability of food and water, and geographic features such as mountains and lakes. Monitoring is the process of assessing how these factors affect pests and the effectiveness of the controls that are being used.
A basic form of monitoring involves simply asking people who work in or visit the facility to report any pest sightings. This can be done in schools, factories, homes, gardens, golf courses and any other places where people congregate. A log can be kept where those observations are recorded, and reports made to the pest manager at regular intervals. This type of monitoring removes the possibility that pesticides will be used when they are not really needed, and can also help to ensure that any pesticides that are used are properly diluted and targeted.