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Using strategies that prevent pests from becoming a problem or reduce their numbers to an acceptable level with as little harm to non-target organisms as possible. Learn More Here!
Rather than waiting to treat a pest infestation, preventative pest control seeks to stop pests from entering an area. This involves an in-depth understanding of pest behavior and routine property inspections.
Infestations may be prevented by reducing attractants, such as food, water and shelter. This requires keeping trash cans tightly closed, removing garbage regularly, and sealing cracks that pests can crawl through. Keep wood piles away from the house to eliminate rodent hiding places, and trim bushes and tree limbs that may provide access to the roof. Keeping windows and doors shut, using door sweeps on all doors, and attaching weather stripping to all window frames helps keep pests out. Moisture is a major attractant for many pests and can be controlled by maintaining proper drainage, fixing leaky faucets and using dehumidifiers in damp areas.
Pests enter buildings through unscreened vents, sewers, basements and open doors. Poor site sanitation contributes to these problems, as can faulty or improper building design and construction. A deteriorating building also allows pests to infiltrate through walls and into rooms through cracks, crevices, and openings around fixtures. Museums should have a plan to monitor and control pest entry points, with staff trained to spot signs of pest activity such as droppings, fecal matter, and rusty or blackened hardware.
Some situations require a threshold for action, beyond which the presence of the pest becomes unacceptable. This is often the case in operating rooms and other sterile areas of health care facilities, where there is zero tolerance for certain diseases or insects that could contaminate equipment or patients.
When a threshold is established, regular monitoring and treatment are usually sufficient to keep pest populations below the acceptable level. This approach is based on the idea that the more a pest is eliminated, the less chance it will come back.
Preventive methods often use baits or traps, which are more effective than spraying and do not expose people or pets to the harmful effects of pesticides. However, if baits and traps are not effective, low-risk spraying can be used in specific locations to eliminate the pests without exposing humans or pets to pesticides.
Suppression Methods
Suppression methods involve using physical or mechanical techniques to reduce the population of a pest to levels that are not damaging. This includes preventing or removing the pests’ food sources, shelter, overwintering sites, water supplies and other environmental conditions that they require to survive or thrive.
This often involves trapping, monitoring, and scouting. This will help you decide whether or not the problem has reached the threshold level that warrants action, and determine what kind of control measures are needed. It also helps you monitor the effects of controls on the target organism and on other non-target organisms (e.g., beneficial insects).
Some physical barriers can help keep pests out of plants, such as window screens for keeping health and nuisance pests out of buildings, floating row covers for many horticultural crops, and tarps or sticky cards for repelling thrips or aphids. Other barriers include planting in sandy or loamy soil to prevent pests from entering fields, and the use of tanglefoot (a petroleum-based sticky material available as a gel or spray) or other products to create barriers that ants can’t cross.
If you are using biological control, scouting is especially important to determine the state of both the pest and the natural enemies. This information will help you develop strategies for managing the pests, including determining when to release biological control agents. These agents must be carefully selected and quarantined to ensure that they do not introduce disease into the crop or cause harm to other natural enemies. They are then released in the field, with careful attention to timing in both the enemy and pest life cycles, to suppress the pests without damaging the crop.
Biological control agents may be parasites, predators or pathogens. They can be introduced in a natural environment or mass-reared in insectaries and then applied in the field to control pests. For example, different strains of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) are marketed to control a number of caterpillars, aphids and other insects. These organisms are safe for humans and other animals but are deadly to the target pests.
Eradication Methods
While it is not necessary or desirable to eradicate all pests from urban landscapes, we need to manage them so that they do not become severe problems. To do so, we must first understand why pests occur.
A healthy and balanced ecosystem contains a variety of organisms, including insects, plants, bacteria, and fungi, all of which compete for resources and may also provide natural control of one another. Over-interference with the ecosystem, however, disrupts this balance and can result in major pest outbreaks.
IPM programs aim to keep pest populations below damaging levels by using a combination of mechanical, cultural and biological methods. Frequent monitoring and scouting are key to IPM, with the goal of establishing an action threshold that indicates when pest control actions should be taken.
For example, if a juniper tree appears to be losing needles and its foliage is chewed or defoliated, the damage would be considered significant enough for pest control measures to be initiated. A careful inspection of the tree and its surroundings might reveal the presence of bagworms Theridopteryx ephemeraeformis, which are relatively easy to identify because they appear as carrot-shaped bags in the branches.
Physical controls for bagworms include diligent hand-picking of the bags, which can be easily dislodged with a padded stick; spraying of trees with a strong stream of water to knock them loose; and removal of weeds that provide shelter for the pests or harbor them. Other methods of physical control for pests include using a weeder to remove slugs and snails from garden beds; using tillage to expose soil insects to desiccation or predation by birds; and removing crop residues that may serve as overwintering sites for pests.
Insect pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, fungi, and nematodes can be used to achieve biological control of insect pests by attacking them directly. These organisms are a useful alternative to chemical pesticides, as they attack only the targeted insect species and do not harm non-target plants or beneficial insects. In addition, several strains of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis are available that can be used to control certain caterpillar and larval pests with little risk to people or the environment.
Biological Control
In biological control, natural enemy species are used to suppress pest populations at very low densities. This is in contrast to chemical treatments that typically seek to eradicate a pest population. Unlike the broad-spectrum, highly toxic chemicals, most natural enemies are extremely specific and kill only their target pest species (or related prey). This provides an opportunity for reduced environmental impact and a more integrated approach to pest management. However, this also means that the development of chemical resistance can be a problem.
Many homeowners practice conservation biological control. This involves attracting and protecting natural enemies in the home landscape through changes in land management practices. This is in contrast to classical or importation biological control, which is mostly limited to scientific practitioners.
When practicing classical biological control, a natural enemy species is imported from another region and released into an area in which it does not occur naturally. This is most commonly done in greenhouses, nurseries, and some fruit and vegetable fields. The species is usually mass-reared in insectaries and then placed in the field where it is to be released in order to establish a sustainable population.
The success of a biological control agent depends on a number of factors, including its ability to find and consume the pest, its reproductive rate, and its ability to survive in the field under conditions that could potentially affect its survival or reproduction. The ability to tolerate or resist disease is another important characteristic of a potential biological control agent.
Biological control agents may also be able to induce or promote plant disease resistance in the host plants. This is often referred to as hyperparasitism or induced resistance, and it requires very specific interactions between plants, beneficial microorganisms and pathogens.
Because a wide range of factors can influence the outcome of a biocontrol project, the success of biocontrol depends on a careful risk assessment by the practitioners. This includes determining whether the cost of a biological control program is economically justified compared to alternative options for managing a particular pest problem. In addition, the effectiveness of a biological control strategy should be carefully monitored to ensure that the desired result is being achieved.
