Pests are unwanted organisms that damage or degrade agricultural crops, food stores, gardens, lawns, trees, buildings, and other human structures. They also disrupt the balance of natural ecosystems and cause serious health problems for humans and animals.
Accurate identification is the first step in pest control. It helps you determine basic information about the pest, including its life cycle and the time when it is most susceptible to being controlled. Contact Pest Control San Antonio now!
The goal of pest control is to prevent the occurrence of unwanted organisms. This is a difficult goal in outdoor situations where the habitat continuously changes, and environmental conditions make it easy for certain organisms to become pests—preventing pests in indoor environments (such as offices, schools, health care, food processing, and food preparation facilities) is more feasible because the environment is generally controlled.
The best method for preventing pests is to make the environment inhospitable to them. This may involve modifying the environment, such as providing less favorable feeding or breeding sites; or it may involve physical barriers such as fences or traps. It also may involve using resistant species of plants, animals, and structures. Resistance can be due to chemical compounds in the host that repel or inhibit pests, such as nematodes and mycoplasmas; physical characteristics of the host that make it unattractive to pests, such as toughness, spiny spines, and sharp prickles; or pheromones, which are natural insect chemicals that affect behavior, such as attracting or deterring other insects from eating a plant.
If the prevention of pests fails, the next step in a pest management program is suppression. This can be achieved by using any number of physical and chemical methods. It is important to know how many pests are present before starting any suppression efforts. This can be done through scouting, which is the regular searching for and identification of pests and the damage they cause. Monitoring for insect, insect-like, mollusk, and vertebrate pests usually is done by trapping or through visual inspection. Monitoring for weed and microbial pests is often accomplished through sampling or by studying the environment in which they occur, such as soil conditions and moisture levels.
Chemicals used for pest control include herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. It is essential that the person responsible for applying pesticides understand and follow proper application techniques, personal protective equipment requirements, and other safety measures. In addition, a pesticide must be selected that will control the pests in a manner that does not harm people or the environment. Only qualified pest control professionals should use chemical pesticides, which are often highly toxic.
Suppression
The goal of suppression is to reduce the size of a pest population to an acceptable level. This may be accomplished through physical traps, barriers, or other means. Often, chemical control methods are needed to complement these control measures. These can include the use of pheromones, juvenile hormones, or other natural insect chemicals that prevent pests from maturing into adult form. This method typically works best at the early stages of a pest infestation, before large numbers of adult insects emerge.
When prevention and suppression fail to reduce a pest population to an acceptable level, eradication is necessary. This is generally done by applying pesticides to areas where the pests are present. This can be done at a very small scale (such as a single building or backyard) or on a much larger scale. Eradication methods usually require pesticides that are highly toxic and should only be used by qualified professionals, who follow local, State and Federal regulations regarding pesticide use.
The success of any pest management strategy is dependent on a number of factors, including the biology, behavior, habitat and environmental conditions that promote and support the pest in question. Climate influences both the amount of damage a pest does and its rate of growth and reproduction, while food, water, shelter and space are also important to most pests. Natural enemies, such as predators, parasites, and pathogens, often help to suppress pest populations.
Monitoring is a critical aspect of pest control. It includes identifying the pest species, determining whether the pest is causing significant damage and when it will reach a threshold level that requires control. Monitoring of insect, insect-like, mollusk and vertebrate pests is normally done through trapping and scouting, while monitoring of weed and microbial pests is usually accomplished by visual inspection. In many instances, monitoring also involves checking environmental conditions, such as temperature and moisture levels – especially humidity – to determine if they are conducive to pest development. This information helps to guide decisions about when to start and stop pest management activities. It also helps to decide what types of control measures will be most effective and minimize the chance of pesticide resistance.
Eradication
An eradication is the ultimate goal of pest control and refers to the removal of an unwanted organism. This can be achieved by killing the organism or preventing it from reproducing. Eradication is often done with the use of chemicals, although other methods are also available.
Pests are any organism that negatively impacts humans, their activities, crops or property. They can be animals, plants, fungi or even bacteria. While it may be easy for the average person to deal with the odd ant’s nest or a mouse in the house, pest management professionals have specialised skills and equipment. Their work is essential to protect public health by preventing the spread of disease carried by pests, safeguarding agriculture and food supplies, preserving property from damage, and maintaining ecological balance by removing invasive species that disrupt native species.
Generally, pests are categorised into two groups: those that carry diseases and those that cause destruction. Some examples of disease-carrying pests are flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches. Rodents such as rats and mice are commonly classed as pests, too, particularly in food or catering businesses where they can cause contamination and damage.
Chemical pesticides are among the most common and effective forms of pest control. They include herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. Some kill the pests, others prevent them from reproducing and some control the growth or remove the foliage of the pests’ target plant. They are often used in conjunction with other forms of pest control such as traps, baits and physical removal.
However, there are a number of reasons why chemical pesticides might fail to be effective. The pests may have become resistant to the chemical, or they could be at a stage in their life cycle or in an area that isn’t susceptible to the pesticide. In any event, a failed pesticide application should be reviewed to determine what went wrong and whether another method is required.
Biological methods of pest control are one of the oldest and involve introducing other natural organisms to manage a targeted pest population. These organisms might be natural predators of the targeted pest, or they might be genetically modified microorganisms that are specifically designed to target a particular species of pest.
Biological Management
Biological management uses predators, parasitoids and pathogens to control unwanted insects, mites, weeds or plant diseases. It is an integral part of integrated pest management (IPM).
Unlike chemical pesticides, which are often applied to kill a pest population immediately, biological controls usually build up over time and gradually reduce a pest to acceptable levels. This approach is also less likely to result in resistance development and environmental drawbacks.
The concept of using natural enemies to control insect and other pests dates back thousands of years, with Chinese growers noted for bringing in ants to control citrus pests as far back as 324 BC. Modern biological control methods include the use of native and introduced natural enemies as well as augmentation and mass production and release of predators, parasitoids, pathogens and competitors.
Most of the work done with biological control involves insects, but the principles apply to other organisms as well. The main goal is to use a natural enemy that can suppress a pest to a point where it no longer causes economic damage. Eradication of a pest, even after a chemical treatment, is rarely possible and can leave the environment open to reinvasion with a much reduced natural enemy population.
A major goal in biological control is to find and produce natural enemies that are effective against a particular pest. This can involve research in the target species’ native country or region. When a promising organism is found, it must undergo quarantine and then be rescreened to make sure that it does not carry any undesirable characteristics such as disease, hyperparasitoids or invasiveness.
Once a natural enemy is ready for field testing, it can be reared in large numbers and released in fields to see how effective it is against the target pest. Rearing, shipping and releasing beneficial organisms is more labor intensive than spraying chemicals, but the long term benefits can be substantial.
There is much interest in the use of natural enemies to control insect pests because fewer and less persistent chemicals are becoming available and because consumer demand for organic products continues to grow. Many state departments of agriculture maintain insect rearing laboratories to support local programs for reducing the use of harmful insecticides. The New Jersey Department of Agriculture operates the Phillip Alampi Beneficial Insect Rearing Laboratory and supplies a variety of insect species for assisting in the control of certain insect and weed pests.