Keeping a hygienic house and regularly cleaning dark, damp areas limits pest breeding grounds. Ask pest control operators to use baits and crack and crevice treatments instead of surface sprays.
Natural forces influence pest populations, allowing them to rise and fall without human intervention. These may include weather, the availability of food and water, natural enemies, and biological controls such as nematodes that prey on soil insects or pheromones that interrupt insect development. For more information, Visit Our Website to know more.
The best approach to pest control is preventing their appearance in the first place. Pest infestations can lead to costly repairs, health hazards and damage to property. The key to prevention is a combination of building modifications, sanitation practices and exclusion techniques that make buildings unattractive to pests. These preventive measures include inspecting buildings regularly to identify and address problems before they spread, sealing cracks and gaps that allow pests to enter, maintaining good sanitation practices to eliminate food sources, reducing shelter for pests and modifying the environment to limit their access to water, food and breeding sites.
Preventive pest management strategies may be biological, physical or chemical in nature. Biological control involves the use of natural enemies of pests, including parasites, predators and pathogens. This approach is not eradication and typically requires a lag time between pest population increase and the emergence of the natural enemy species. Physical controls involve barriers, traps and other mechanical means to prevent pests from entering or exiting a site and include things like keeping food in sealed containers, removing garbage frequently, fixing leaky plumbing and trimming plants away from structures. Chemical controls involve the use of pesticides and should be used sparingly and with care to minimize resistance and environmental contamination. It is important to understand pests’ life cycles when using chemical controls, since certain insecticides are effective only at certain stages of development and some have less desirable effects on beneficial insects.
While careful maintenance and sanitation will help keep pest populations low, even the most well-maintained buildings can fall victim to an infestation. Infestations may occur because of a sudden loss of food or a disruption in the normal life cycle of the pest population, an interruption in their supply of water or a change in weather that limits their ability to find overwintering sites or shelter.
The best way to reduce pest infestations is to work with a professional who will implement preventive pest control methods. In addition to routine inspections and cleaning, this may include the use of pest-resistant plant varieties, the use of mulches that discourage pest habitation and the removal of water sources near buildings, such as by fixing leaking plumbing.
Suppression
Pest control involves keeping pest numbers and damage at a level that we can live with, while doing as little harm as possible to other organisms. Accurate identification of the pest is a key element in this process.
Suppression can be accomplished by preventing or interrupting the development of the pest or by altering its environment to make it unsuitable for it. Physical methods of pest control include traps, screens, barriers, fences, nets, radiation and even chemical sprays to change the pest’s habitat or its behavior.
Landscape composition and configuration can also be important determinants of pest control. For example, the ability of natural enemies to suppress pests may vary between coarse-grained landscapes with large patches and low density of edges and fine-grained landscapes with small patches and high densities of edges. Landscapes with more cover types and a higher diversity of species are expected to provide better opportunities for complementation between predators and prey than do landscapes that are sparsely vegetated.
Other forms of suppression involve changing the environment to make it less favorable for the pest, such as by removing the host plant from which the pest is taking its food or by reducing the availability of its preferred feeding or mating sites. This approach is sometimes called cultural control, because it affects the environment in which the pest lives.
Many diseases that reduce the rate of insect growth or reproduction, prevent it from completing its life cycle or kill it are naturally controlled by insects’ natural enemies. These diseases are caused by bacteria, fungi, protozoans and other microorganisms that infect insects, or by parasites, such as mites, aphids and nematodes, that live on or in the pest.
These natural controls can be supplemented by introducing additional natural enemies into the target area, or by biologically altering a pest’s population, such as by producing and releasing sterile males or using chemicals like pheromones to manipulate pest mating or host-finding behavior. There is often a time lag between the increased numbers of natural enemies and the decreased population of the pest, so these methods are usually considered to be forms of suppression rather than control.
Eradication
Eradication refers to the removal of a pest from an area, leaving it free of the species. This usually involves the destruction of all living individuals of the pest in an area where recolonization is unlikely to occur. The eradication process may be achieved through surveillance, containment or treatment and control measures. It is essential that there be adequate documentation and process controls to ensure that the absence of the pest can be verified when a programme is completed. This verification should use criteria established at the beginning of the programme, and may need to involve independent analysis if the NPPOs of importing countries require this reassurance.
The eradication of a pest is a costly business, and a number of factors influence its success. Some of these are inherent in the biology of the pest, and some relate to the circumstances of a particular outbreak (e.g., the quick reaction time of management authorities, the level of public support and cooperation and the extent to which stakeholder organizations are engaged in the eradication effort).
Other factors can be managed. Specifically, the use of appropriate biological control agents in combination with chemical controls, the eradication of all possible vectors, the avoidance of human or animal contact with infested plants and the provision of appropriate training for personnel involved in eradication programmes are considered to be important elements in successful eradication efforts.
The eradication of a pest often requires a long-term commitment by all stakeholders. This can include a commitment to invest in the development of biological control agents and other methods that are effective against the pest, and to provide financial resources for the eradication effort. This also includes a commitment to continue monitoring the area to ensure that the pest has not been re-introduced. This monitoring will usually include sampling of the air, soil and water to determine whether the pest is present. If it is not, then a declaration of eradication can be made. If the pest is found again, then it is a matter of re-establishing an eradication programme.
Monitoring
Using monitoring to determine the occurrence of pests and their damage is the basic element of integrated pest management (IPM). Scouting or checking for pests and assessing their levels is important to an effective IPM strategy. This information helps to define action thresholds. Thresholds are the levels at which pest control tactics must be employed to prevent unacceptable levels of injury or harm.
Pests can be categorized as continuous pests that are always present and require regular controls, sporadic or migratory pests that need occasional or intermittent controls, and potential pests that aren’t yet damaging crops but may need to be controlled under certain conditions. Once the identification and monitoring processes have identified the pests and their damage, IPM strategies begin to plan preventive and avoidance control tactics that minimize impacts on human health and the environment. These include crop manipulations such as planting and harvesting times, plant variety selection, and use of cultural practices, biological control, and mechanical and physical controls.
Monitoring is an essential component of a pest control system because it provides early detection of problems and lets managers know how well their prevention or avoidance tactics are working. It also helps to track environmental factors such as weather and food or harborage availability that affect pest populations. These data provide valuable inputs to computer models that help to project future pest populations and predict if damage is likely and what control tactics would be most effective.
Many pests are kept in check by natural enemies such as predators, parasites, or diseases. It is also useful to monitor the effect of these organisms on the pest population and to identify and recognize the beneficial organisms that are acting as biocontrol agents. This information is vital to IPM because it lets farmers know which pests are best controlled by natural enemies and what type of control methods to use when the natural enemy populations decline or are eliminated.
Monitoring can be done visually, using traps, or by checking glue boards in areas where pests are a problem, such as kitchen cabinets and crawl spaces. Glue boards are placed in corners and flush against walls where pests may be hiding. Check the boards frequently, replacing them when they become dusty or dirty.