Pests like ants, mice and cockroaches are a nuisance in homes. Look for a pest control company that specializes in the kind of pest you have and knows the area you live in.
Identifying the pest is the first step to controlling it. Knowing its behavior and biology helps you select the right control measures at the right time. Contact Pest Control In Louisville KY now!
Some organisms can be pests if they interfere with human activities, including food production, health and safety. Pests include:
- Rodents (black and brown rats, squirrels).
- Crawling insects (ants, cockroaches, beetles, and termites).
- Flying insects (houseflies, blowflies, fruit flies, fermentation flies, mosquitoes, and wasps).
Some pest control techniques are preventive, whereas others are intended to destroy existing populations or reduce their numbers. Prevention is generally less expensive and more environmentally friendly than suppression and eradication. It includes inspecting the environment, eliminating their food and water sources, and sealing entry points into structures. In addition, it involves avoiding introducing new materials that might attract pests.
Preventive steps also include modifying the environment to make it unfavorable for these unwanted organisms, such as keeping areas clean and free of clutter. A screen on the window will keep many pests out of the house, and caulking cracks and crevices can block them from entering. Other preventive measures include storing foods in airtight containers and using garbage cans with tight lids.
Infestations usually occur when pests are able to enter homes and other buildings. Pests may come in through cracks, holes, loose siding, or other openings. Often, the pests are seeking food or shelter, but once inside the structure, they can damage furniture and other belongings and cause serious health problems.
Regular inspections of the interior and exterior of a home or other building can detect these entry points. In addition, screens can be used on windows and doors to prevent pests from entering. Cracks and holes should be filled as soon as they are discovered, and dehumidifiers can be used in damp basements.
In the case of a commercial or industrial setting, an inspector can use pest traps or baits and apply approved sprays to other surfaces as necessary. The type of treatment depends on the pest and the environment, and a licensed professional will avoid damaging people or the environment, as much as possible. Foggers and bombs should never be used, as they can disperse toxic chemicals throughout a building where they are not needed.
Suppression
Pests such as insects, diseases and weeds cause economic damage to trees or other crops. Avoiding these damages requires a combination of prevention, suppression and eradication tactics. Prevention tactics include eliminating entry points for pests (e.g., repairing holes in fences or covering open garbage containers), keeping field roads clean and preventing movement of firewood that might be infested with citrus psyllid pathogens. Other preventive measures include monitoring trees or plants for signs of damage by pests and taking corrective action as needed.
Some of these pests are easily visible, such as spiders, lacewings, lady beetles and ground beetles. Others, such as parasitic wasps and flies, nematodes and plant pathogens are less obvious. Preventing the use of pesticides that kill beneficial organisms is an important way to keep natural enemies available to control the pests we try to suppress.
If preventive measures fail or the number of pests increases above an economic threshold, suppression tactics are used to reduce damage until the population reaches sustainable levels. Suppression tactics can include manual removal of the pests (e.g., hand picking), chemical sprays or releasing predators or parasitoids to overwhelm them.
Parasitoid and predator releases generally have a greater impact on pest populations than do herbivores alone. However, the efficacy of parasitoids and predators is affected by their ability to compete for resources with pests and the landscape context. A field exclusion experiment on oilseed rape (OSR) showed that niche partitioning between parasitoids and ground-dwelling predators, with each consuming a different developmental stage of the pest, increased biological control.
Pests that originated in other countries often arrive without their natural enemies, which would normally keep them in check back home. Such “introduced species” sometimes become invasive, out-competing native fauna for food or shelter and displacing other native organisms. One strategy to overcome this problem is to release natural enemies from the pest’s country of origin. This is called “inundative” biological control.
However, outdoor releases of biological control agents are frequently disrupted by unpredictable environmental conditions such as high winds or unseasonable hot or cold temperatures. The results of these erratic releases can be further complicated by the fact that other insecticides often kill the natural enemy of the pest being controlled. The use of microbial pesticides that do not kill the natural enemy of the pest may be necessary in such cases.
Eradication
Pests can cause serious damage to crops and the environment. The goal of pest control is to reduce the number of pests to an acceptable level. Pesticides can be used to achieve this, but there are also more natural ways to reduce pest populations.
The most effective approach is prevention, which involves stopping pests before they start to cause damage. This can be achieved by accurate identification of the pest and making sure that all possible entry points are sealed. Many pests can be controlled without the use of chemicals by using biological controls, such as parasitism, herbivory, and predatory behaviour. This can be accomplished by introducing the natural enemies of the pest into the area, either in small batches through the use of pheromone traps or large scale releases of sterile organisms. There is a time lag between pest population increase and the onset of natural controls, however.
Chemical pest control is usually used when prevention and suppression have not been successful. This is often very expensive and environmentally damaging, but there are ways to minimise the use of chemical control agents. These include using a combination of the other control methods to produce the most effective and least damaging plan. A popular method is Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which is an ecological process that integrates all of these methods.
Monitoring is a necessary part of any pest control programme. It is important to know what pests are present and how much damage they are causing, so that the appropriate measures can be taken. It is a good idea to get professional advice on this, as there are many different types of traps and other devices that can be used to monitor pest activity.
In outdoor pest situations, eradication is usually only attempted when it can be shown that the pest has been a major threat to a particular industry, such as the Mediterranean fruit fly or gypsy moth. In enclosed environments, eradication is a more realistic goal, as pests cannot be tolerated in such places as operating rooms and other sterile areas of health care facilities.
Natural Forces
Natural forces that keep pest populations below economically and aesthetically acceptable thresholds include parasites, predators, pathogens, and other organisms that attack or kill the pest. Such enemies may also affect the abundance of the pest’s food source, restrict its ability to reproduce or find a place to overwinter, or cause it to release chemicals that disrupt mating and host-finding behavior. The need to suppress or eradicate a pest population can be reduced by augmenting these natural enemies. This can be done by releasing large numbers of sterile males or pheromones to control the pest’s reproduction, by using cultural methods that reduce the pest’s availability of its food source or shelter, or by physical means such as removing nests and blocking access to overwintering sites.
Organisms rise to pest status when they escape normal control by natural regulating agents. This can occur through direct or indirect human intervention, such as direct importation into a new region or the accidental killing off of natural enemies in crop-pest-enemy systems by chemical pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Once pest status is attained, a species can quickly grow to levels that produce significant damage (e.g., locust swarms stripping landscapes).
In general, the use of natural enemies as pest control agents is preferable to the therapeutic approach that relies on killing organisms with toxic chemicals. A number of problems arise with this reliance, however. These include toxic residues, resistance development, secondary pest outbreaks, and ecosystem disruption. Alternative tools that are less damaging, such as microbials and inundative releases of natural enemies, do not address these issues because they still use the classic therapeutic approach, which leaves us in a confrontation with nature.
The goal of the archetype model is to develop a set of rules that will predict how natural processes and multitrophic interactions influence crop-pest-enemy dynamics at landscape to global scales. This will require collecting data from natural systems around the world. This will be combined with mechanistic understanding based on ecological theory to link system attribute values to the processes that determine system responses. An iterative process of model development and validation could then be used to identify an optimal set of rules for worldwide application.