Pests can carry bacteria and diseases that threaten your family’s health. They contaminate food and water sources. They can also gnaw through wires, exposing you to dangerous electrical hazards.
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Whether it’s a LEED platinum office building, a five-star hotel, or your child’s classroom, pests threaten the integrity of green buildings. Their damage can lower property values, decrease energy efficiency, and introduce disease, asthmagens, and other environmental health problems. Getting rid of them can be expensive and often requires frequent and repeated pesticide treatments. Preventing pests is the best way to protect a building and its inhabitants.
The key to preventive pest control is vigilance. Regular inspections and maintenance practices are crucial to preventing pest infestations. This includes checking for signs of pests such as feces, droppings, and live or dead insects or rodents. It also includes cleaning up food scraps and crumbs, wiping down surfaces and mopping floors to remove the attractants that make these areas appealing to pests. For example, drains should be thoroughly cleaned to remove the buildup that encourages small flies to breed and grow in them.
Crawling and walking pests include rodents such as mice and rats, arachnoids such as spiders, millipedes, centipedes and beetles and other insects such as cockroaches and ants. They can cause damage to indoor and outdoor plants and contaminate food. They can also transmit diseases to humans, such as histoplasmosis (a respiratory disease caused by a fungus that grows in the lungs of those who ingest it).
Preventive measures for these pests include sealing cracks and other entry points into buildings; making sure garbage receptacles have tight-fitting lids and are emptied regularly; keeping grass, weeds and other vegetation away from buildings; and routinely inspecting and repairing landscaping elements. Regular pest inspections and monitoring by a professional can help prevent the need for aggressive treatments that may harm desirable plants, pets or people.
In addition to these steps, an integrated pest management plan should include prevention, suppression and eradication methods when needed. Eradication can be difficult to achieve in outdoor environments because pests are so resilient and can adapt to changing conditions. However, in some situations, such as eradicating the Mediterranean fruit fly or the gypsy moth, eradication has been successful.
Suppression
Pests cause damage to the environment, homes and businesses. They carry diseases and can contaminate food, making them a health concern. They can also cause allergic reactions and asthma attacks in people.
Pest control includes steps to prevent these problems from happening, as well as methods to eliminate them once they do occur. Preventive measures include monitoring the field, landscape, building or forest and identifying the pests that need to be controlled. Correct identification is crucial because it helps you decide whether a particular species should be tolerated or controlled. It is also important to know how the pests live and what factors might influence its behavior.
When a pest does invade, the goal is to limit its damage and minimize harm to everything else in the environment. Prevention and suppression are often paired with each other because many pest situations can be resolved with the right combination of preventive measures and controls.
Prevention strategies involve reducing the availability of water to pests, altering habitat, providing shelter and food for predators and parasites, and changing cultural practices. In the long run, this can reduce pest populations without damaging the surrounding ecosystem.
A common prevention strategy is to seal the crawl space in a home. It is a three-foot-high area under the floor that is like a basement and contains plumbing and wiring. It can attract rodents and is a favorite hiding spot for insects such as silverfish, earwigs, centipedes and beetles. In the kitchen, a venting system that removes steam is useful to avoid the buildup of condensation that could lead to pest problems.
Suppression involves controlling a pest when its presence is unacceptable. This usually means reducing the population to an acceptable level. Suppression should be done using a method that causes minimal harm to the rest of the ecosystem, such as a biological pest control program or the use of resistant varieties. Choosing the proper time for controlling a pest is important. If it is controlled at the wrong time, the beneficial insects and other organisms that share the same environment may be harmed.
Eradication
Eradicating pests is a tall order and requires an immense amount of work and resources. It is usually done at the local, national or international level and involves many people. This type of control typically relies on a wide variety of methods to disrupt pest life cycles and prevent reproduction. This may include the release of natural enemies, genetic engineering, or chemical pesticides.
The first step in the eradication process is accurate pest identification. This can be difficult, but it is important for choosing effective controls and monitoring. It is also essential to understand the factors that led to the infestation, such as environmental conditions or a lack of barriers. Once you know the pest infestation’s tolerance levels, you can select appropriate controls to keep them below that threshold.
If you decide to use chemicals, you should always use the least toxic method possible. Avoid spraying plants or animals. Instead, try using baits and crack-and-crevice treatments. You should also read and follow the pesticide’s label. It should include directions for use and safety precautions. Also, be sure to dispose of leftover pesticide and its container properly.
You can also use biological control, which is the use of natural enemies to reduce or eliminate a harmful organism. Some of these enemies are parasites, pathogens, and predators. Parasitic nematodes, such as the cockroach-eating nematode Steinernema carpocapsae, help fight off grubs, fleas, flies and gnats by injecting their prey with a poison that kills them.
Another natural option for pest control is pheromones, which are natural odors that female insects produce to attract males. Some pheromones can confuse males and prevent mating, which can lower pest populations. Other pheromones can trigger the release of sterile males, which can further reduce pest numbers. Pheromones and other biological options are often used in combination with other control techniques.
The best way to prevent an infestation is to take steps to deny pests the food, water and shelter they need to thrive. For example, remove rotting wood and stacks of newspapers from your yard to deprive ants and other pests of their food sources.
Control
Pest control focuses on keeping pests from damaging plants, food and structures. This can be done through exclusion or quarantine, repulsion, physical removal or chemical controls such as trapping, fogging, dusting, granules and sprays. Pests that can be particularly problematic include rodents (which can spread diseases such as salmonella and histoplasmosis), ants, wasps, bees and cluster flies, cockroaches and other insects that carry or cause allergies or illnesses such as asthma, dermatitis and hay fever.
The first step in any pest management program is correct identification. Having this information helps determine whether the pest can be tolerated or is in need of eradication, and also what types of control methods to use. This is called threshold-based decision-making. For example, a few wasps flying around the house every once in a while may not warrant action, but dozens of them buzzing around the garden might.
Other pest control measures are mechanical or physical, such as trapping and blocking (traps and screens), mulches, steam sterilization of soil and preventing pests from entering by modifying their environment (sheaths for strawberries, trap crops for Japanese beetles). Physical controls can kill or repel the pests and can also break the pests’ life cycle by removing eggs, larvae or other stages of development. Chemical pest control includes nonresidual pesticides that lose their toxicity quickly after application, as well as persistent or semi-persistent chemicals that remain in the environment longer.
Preventing pests from coming into the home or business is the best way to prevent infestations. This can be accomplished by removing the pests’ food, water and shelter sources by keeping food in tightly closed containers or disposing of trash regularly and with a lid, and reducing clutter and areas where the pests can hide. In addition, some pests can be deterred by installing fly screens or bait stations, while others may respond to biological controls such as parasitoids and predators or the introduction of sterile insect populations.
For serious problems, professional services such as fumigation and spraying can be used to kill or repel the pests. This method can be very effective, but it is not without its risks, such as potential health and safety concerns with some volatile chemicals and the disruption of the environment. Fumigation involves pumping the entire structure with a gas that will kill or repel the pests.