Pest control involves using devices, chemicals, physical controls, and cultural practices to manage organisms negatively impacting human activities. Physical and mechanical controls include traps, barriers, and screens that deter pests and modify the environment by changing moisture levels or temperature.
Effective management must balance the need to prevent damage with the desire to restore natural ecological processes. Identification of the pest is critical for developing an appropriate control strategy. Click the https://trappingusa.com/plano/ to learn more.
Accurate pest identification is the first step in a successful pest management program. It helps determine basic information about the pest, such as its life cycle and the environment in which it lives. The information also guides the selection of control tactics that will be most effective and cause the least damage to people and property.
Different pests require a variety of control methods. Using the wrong ones can not only be ineffective, but it can also harm beneficial organisms and the ecosystem. For example, applying a pesticide to control cockroaches will not be effective against termites.
Pests often hide in dark, secluded places where they are difficult to see. A flashlight and a magnifying glass can be useful tools for inspecting such harborage areas. Inspecting for evidence of pest activity can also be helpful, such as frass (excrement), egg masses, pheromones, and other signs of infestation.
It is important to note that some pests are not considered to be a nuisance. For example, the larvae of boxelder bugs and multicolored lady beetles can be helpful natural pest control agents that feed on aphids, which are a serious agricultural pest.
Many resources are available to help in pest identification, including online identification aids and field guides. Many of these can be found at the Ask Extension website.
A good place to start is by noting the pest’s characteristics, such as size, color, number of legs and wings or antennae, and whether it has a long nose. Then, compare the pest to pictures of common pests in a guide and choose the one that best matches. This will provide helpful identification clues about the pest, such as what foods it eats, its preferred habitat and conditions, its threats, and its prevention and control strategies.
Once the pest is identified, an IPM strategy can be developed to reduce its population without the use of harmful chemicals. In some instances, such as with aphids and cluster flies, simple steps like maintaining good sanitation, sealing entry points into the home, storing firewood properly, and vacuuming the house regularly can eliminate or greatly reduce a pest problem. In other cases, such as with ants and cockroaches, baits or repellents may be necessary to effectively control pest populations.
Pesticides
Pesticides are chemicals that kill or repel unwanted organisms, such as insects, weeds, mildew, and germs. They may be synthetic, created in labs, or organic, derived from natural sources. They can be absorbed through the skin, inhaled, or ingested. They can also contaminate water, soil, food, and human bodies. The ideal pesticide would destroy its target without causing negative effects to humans, other plants, or animals in the environment. However, no pesticide is perfect; they often have unintended side effects.
Pesticides can be applied as sprays, powders, baits, or injected into the ground. They are grouped into chemical families, or classes, because they work in the same way on the pest. For example, organophosphates control pests by disrupting nerve-impulse transmission and inhibiting an enzyme (cholinesterase) that regulates acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter.
Most pesticides are toxic to one or more plant parts, and can be acutely harmful at high concentrations over short periods of time, or chronically from repeated exposure at lower levels over a longer period of time. Most are not immediately broken down by microbes or other living things, and can remain in the environment for months or even years. Some are persistent in the soil and in human and animal fat tissue. They are often used along with other pest control methods, such as traps, mats, or barriers.
A few pesticides are “systemic,” meaning they move through a plant, traveling up the xylem and down the phloem in the same manner as water. These are generally less toxic than contact or non-systemic pesticides.
Always read the label of any pesticide you use and follow its directions exactly. Never use more pesticide than recommended on the label; doing so increases your risk of injury to your plants or contamination of the environment with excess chemicals. Store diluted pesticides only as long as the label says, and dispose of them in an approved fashion. Use insect-attracting plants and natural controls, such as nematodes and birds, to keep insect populations down before resorting to pesticides. Avoid spraying during windy conditions, which can carry the chemical off-target into areas where it isn’t needed or wanted.
Prevention
A pest control program is most effective when the goal is prevention. Prevention focuses on small actions that help prevent an infestation from starting in the first place, rather than treating an infestation once it has already formed.
Prevention also includes measures that take advantage of natural forces that influence the behavior of pests, such as climate and predators, as well as natural barriers like mountains, water, or forest. These forces usually work in concert with human efforts to help reduce or eliminate pests.
Physical or mechanical controls include traps, screens, fences, nets, radiation, and chemicals to alter the environment in which pests live, often causing them to die off. The use of these controls can be very helpful in preventing an infestation from occurring at all, or it can be used to control the outbreak after other methods have failed.
In addition to physical controls, there are biological control methods. These include releasing parasitoids and predators that feed on or kill the pests. They can be very useful in decreasing the populations of many pests, particularly insects such as thrips and aphids. Early releases of the predatory mite Stratiolaelaps or the parasitic wasp Eretmocerus eremicus can drastically decrease populations of these pests in tomato fields.
Another important aspect of prevention is education. Teaching employees at the plant, from the c-suite to the loading dock, what they can do to help keep pest populations down is critical to success with any prevention program. Employees must be taught how to look for signs of pest problems, such as checking incoming product for evidence of pests and maintaining clean work areas to reduce moisture that can attract pests.
Educating employees to be proactive in their own pest control can also help a facility stay in compliance with food safety regulations. This can help avoid costly product recalls or having product shipments rejected by clients due to a pest problem.
Elimination
The goal of pest control is to bring pest populations below a threshold at which their damage is economically justifiable. This can be achieved by any of the control methods described below, including chemical, biological, cultural and physical/mechanical. Eliminating pests entirely is rarely a realistic option.
Most pests are not harmful, and a certain amount of their activity is necessary for healthy ecosystems. The problems arise when pests are either too numerous or cause excessive damage.
Natural enemies — predators, parasitoids, pathogens, and competitors — play an important role in limiting pest densities. However, a variety of human activities compromise the effectiveness of natural enemies, including the use of broad-spectrum pesticides that kill natural enemies as well as target pests, the design of modern crop plants that often lack key habitat components required by natural enemies, and the cultivation and harvesting of crops that prevent the persistence of natural enemies such as nematodes and beneficial insects.
Classical biological control involves the importation of a potential natural enemy from its native area, or breeding it in a laboratory and releasing it on a large scale (inundatively). This is most common with plant pathogens, but can be used with predators and parasitoids as well. Once established, a natural enemy population can provide long-term control of the pest species.
Chemical control uses synthetic or organic chemicals to regulate pest abundance, often through nerve toxins, growth regulators, or other indirect effects such as pheromones that interfere with insect reproduction and mating behavior. Chemicals are highly toxic to non-target organisms, persist in the environment affecting water supply and soil quality, and can biomagnify up the food chain.
Biological and cultural controls are designed to reduce the impact of pests by changing environmental conditions that favor their development, spread, or survival. This can include exclusion through barriers such as fences or nets, excluding predators by trapping them or removing them from the area, and changing planting or irrigation practices that affect soil or water quality and thereby influence pest establishment, propagation, dispersal, and survival. A carefully designed mix of these tactics is often referred to as integrated pest management, and is generally considered the most desirable approach.
