Pests are undesirable organisms, such as insects, weeds, nematodes, rodents, or vertebrates, that damage or degrade buildings, crops, plants, soil, food, and human health. Pest control tactics include prevention, suppression, and eradication.
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The best pest control is to prevent problems from arising in the first place. This approach is known as integrated pest management (IPM). IPM prioritizes prevention over treatment and emphasizes educating customers so that they can take steps to help keep pests away from their property. It also promotes environmentally conscious practices and responsible methods of controlling pests.
Some pests have natural enemies that limit their numbers and can help control them without chemicals. Releasing these enemies to fight the pests or providing other natural controls, such as habitat modification and barriers, can be useful tools in IPM. The goal is to keep the pest population at or near the desired level without chemical controls.
Steps to preventing pest infestations include:
- Regularly cleaning food preparation surfaces.
- Sealing cracks and crevices in walls and other areas where pests may enter.
- Disposing of trash in sealed containers.
- Trimming trees and bushes that touch the structure.
- Reducing clutter that provides hiding places for insects and rodents.
Insects can cause contamination with disease-causing bacteria from their droppings and bodies, and can cause direct damage to structures, food processing equipment and storage facilities.
Food processing environments are particularly attractive to pests, since they provide easy access to food and water. Infestations can lead to contamination of the finished product and its packaging by rodent droppings, insect parts and excreta, and by microbial pathogens and intestinal worms carried by pests.
A comprehensive preventive program can help to minimize the need for pesticides in and around a food processing facility. This should include regularly inspecting the facility and surrounding area, identifying potential pest habitats and barriers, and establishing procedures to block pest movement from these areas. It should also include establishing a schedule for regular cleaning of all food-contact surfaces to remove sources of moisture and attractants.
Clutter provides rodents, spiders and other pests with a highway into the home or office. Clearing the landscape can eliminate these pathways and reduce opportunities for access to the building. Eliminating wood piles can also make the exterior of the building less appealing to beetles and termites.
Suppression
The goal of suppression is to reduce pest numbers to an acceptable level and limit their damage. This can be achieved with cultural practices (e.g., frequent cleaning to remove host plants, tillage to disrupt egg-laying), physical barriers (e.g., netting, screens in greenhouses to prevent insects), or chemical control agents. Insecticides and herbicides are commonly used in gardens and crop fields, but other chemicals may be applied as well, such as fungicides and nematodes. The use of these agents is based on monitoring, as described in the Monitoring page, to determine when action should be taken.
In most outdoor environments, it is difficult to achieve eradication of pests. However, eradication is often possible in indoor areas of homes; schools, offices, and food processing, storage, and preparation facilities; and greenhouses.
Pests must have a host plant or animal on which to lay eggs and feed. Without this, they cannot survive and reproduce. In addition, many pests are limited in their movement by environmental factors, such as temperature and water availability. Many also are dependent on geographic features that restrict their spread, such as mountains and large bodies of water.
When a pest population has reached unacceptable levels, control measures must be implemented quickly to suppress growth and limit damage. This is a key reason for implementing the prevention and monitoring components of an integrated pest management program.
The choice and timing of control methods is determined by indicators, such as the presence of pests, occurrence of damage, signs of resistance, and thinning of foliage or fruit. The use of pesticides is restricted to the minimum necessary based on an assessment of their impact on beneficial organisms, non-target plants and animals, economics, and environmental impacts.
Biological control involves the conservation and release of natural enemies to control pest populations. Examples of natural enemies are the mites that feed on spider mites in orchards, parasitic nematodes that kill harmful soil grubs, and the wasp that parasitizes greenhouse whitefly. These organisms are usually available from suppliers. When releasing natural enemies, it is important to consider their distribution and abundance in the area, their biology, and their impact on the pests they target. For example, releasing beneficial nematodes in alternating strips within a field can minimize contact between the nematodes and the grubs they target.
Eradication
A pest infestation is a serious problem for home and business owners. It can result in costly damage and health hazards. Several steps can be taken to eliminate pests and prevent them from returning. These measures include proper food storage, eliminating sources of water and shelter, sealing cracks and crevices, and cleaning up garbage. In addition, pests can be controlled with the use of baits and traps. Chemicals and insecticides can also be used to kill pests, but this method should be a last resort as it may harm pets, children, and plants.
Prevention is the most effective means of controlling pests. A good preventative program is a series of ongoing activities that help reduce the occurrence and/or severity of pest problems. This includes regularly inspecting your house for signs of pests, sealing cracks and crevices, repairing windows and doors, placing weather strip around the edges of doors and vents, using traps to control rodents and insects, removing piles of wood or other debris that attract pests, storing food in sealed containers, disposing of garbage regularly, and keeping gardens free of diseased or rotten plants and vegetables.
Eradication is a very difficult goal to achieve in outdoor pest situations, but it can be done. For example, eradication programs for Mediterranean fruit fly, gypsy moth, and fire ants have been successful. In humans, eradication is the reduction to zero worldwide of infectious agents such as smallpox and polio; it may also be achieved through vaccination, as was the case with rinderpest in cattle.
Some of the simplest and most effective methods to eliminate pests are also the most inexpensive. For example, you can repel flies with slices of onion or other pungent vegetables placed near the entry points into your house. The odor will be too strong for them to stand it, and they will be forced to look elsewhere for food. You can also catch cockroaches, ants, and rodents with simple mousetraps, jar traps, and pheromone traps. Garbage should be disposed of promptly, and clutter removed, since pests breed and hide in clutter.
Biological Control
Biological control involves the importation and release of living organisms (such as insects or pathogens) to levels that disrupt or suppress pest populations below damaging or intolerable thresholds. The organisms used in this method are the natural enemies of the pest that occur naturally in the same environment, often in a close balance with the population of their host or prey.
Unlike the more general insecticidal chemicals, these organisms typically have very narrow and specific targets. They are also capable of adjusting their own population levels in response to changes in the abundance of their target species. Because of these characteristics, it is very important to properly identify the pest and select the proper natural enemy for any biological control program.
There are three ways people use these organisms to help suppress pests in their fields, gardens and greenhouses. These approaches include what are known as Augmentation, Classical and Inundative Biological Control. The most important factor in selecting a species of natural enemy for any application is the ability of that natural enemy to persist in the presence of its target pest in order to maintain its population levels. This is particularly true of fungi and other microorganisms, which are often used in biological control.
In addition to the ability of the natural enemy to persist in the presence of a target, the natural enemy must have an exceptionally high reproductive rate and be effective at searching for its host and targeting it at the appropriate times during its life cycle. In addition, the natural enemy should be capable of surviving in a field environment and in the presence of competing species of plant and animal competitors.
For example, a beneficial wasp that parasitizes stink bug eggs is released into an orchard to suppress the stink bugs during the lychee fruiting season. The wasps kill a significant number of the stink bug eggs and significantly reduce the damage they cause to the fruit. As a bonus, the wasps conserve honey bees that would otherwise be pollinating the lychees. Inundative releases are also used to rapidly reduce the numbers of a target pest, such as the fungus Trichogramma that controls aphids in many crops.