Pests can cause damage to crops, structures, or gardens. They may also carry disease.
Preventive measures include keeping food in sealed containers and regularly removing rubbish. Clutter provides places for pests to breed and hide. Contact Pest Control In Bakersfield now!
Pheromones mimic female hormones to confuse male insects and discourage mating, reducing pest numbers. Other natural controls include bird, amphibian, and reptile predators that prey on pests and pathogens that suppress pest populations.
Prevention
A lot can be done to prevent pest infestations from happening in the first place. For example, it is important to take a close look at all the small spaces in and around your home — such as windows that don’t shut completely or holes in doors and screens — and seal them. This is an easy step that can go a long way in stopping pests from entering your home or office. Similarly, it is vital to regularly clean kitchen surfaces and to store food in sealed containers, and to remove garbage from your property on a regular basis.
Another important preventive measure is to inspect your property on a regular basis, both inside and outside. Look for any areas where pests could hide, such as cracks in foundations and walls, and gnaw marks on wood. Also, check to make sure that all the areas in and around your building are properly screened and caulked. This is especially important for areas that are in contact with the outside, such as utility lines and gutters.
Pest infestations usually start when pests find a safe space to enter a property. They are then attracted to the available food, water and shelter. To help eliminate potential entry points, it is helpful to clean up and remove weeds, leaf litter or piles of hay near your building. It is also a good idea to trim overgrown trees and shrubs to reduce the amount of shade they offer, as this can make it harder for pests to find sunlight.
It is also important to pay attention to auditory cues. Scratching or scurrying sounds at night may be a sign that rats and other pests are hiding in the walls or attic. This will allow you to address the problem before it gets out of hand. Taking the time to identify and respond to pest problems early on saves you money, stress, and inconvenience. It is much easier to stop a small pest problem in its tracks than to eradicate an established one. The focus should always be prevention, with suppression and eradication as backup measures.
Suppression
A pest is any organism that damages or contaminates crops, weeds, garden plants, animals, or property. Pest control aims to reduce the number of pests to a level that is acceptable, while also taking care not to harm the environment or human health. Preventing pests from happening in the first place is the best way to keep pest control costs down.
This can be done through cultural practices, mechanical methods or physical devices, biological controls, and/or chemical means. A physical device might be a trap for rodents or a barrier to keep birds out of your garden. Cultural practices include good sanitation, removing debris and infested plant material, and/or growing plants that are resistant to disease or insect damage. Biological controls can be predators, parasites, disease agents, or herbivores that prey on pests or prevent their reproduction. These are often more effective than chemical controls and may have less risk to the environment.
Chemical pesticides can be a useful tool in the hands of a skilled user. However, the best choice is to use non-chemical methods, especially before resorting to chemicals. When using chemicals, choose ones that are not harsh on natural enemies and follow the label instructions and safety warnings carefully.
Eradication is a difficult goal to achieve in outdoor pest situations, where the best strategy is usually prevention and suppression. However, it is the desired goal in indoor environments, such as food processing and storage facilities.
Pests that invade these areas can cause contamination with microbial pathogens or physical damage to foodstuffs. In addition, they might introduce rodent droppings or insect parts into the food supply, which could be detrimental to a person’s health.
The ideal way to control pests is through integrated pest management (IPM). This is an ecosystem-based approach that uses a variety of techniques, including habitat manipulation, modification of cultural practices, and/or the use of resistant varieties. Pesticides are used only after monitoring indicates that they are needed, and they are applied in a manner that minimizes risks to humans and beneficial insects and wildlife. However, even when IPM is being practiced, eradication is sometimes necessary, particularly in enclosed environments.
Eradication
Eradication, as defined by the dictionary, is to “pull up or destroy completely; extirpate.” For pest control purposes, the term means to eliminate a species of organism at the local, regional or global level. It requires strengthening and broadening control efforts beyond prevention and suppression in order to achieve the goal of eliminating a pest from a given area. It is rare for outdoor pests to be eradicated and usually limited to eradication programs focused on limiting the spread of infectious diseases, such as yellow fever, guinea worm or poliomyelitis.
Eradicating a pest can be accomplished by natural, biological or chemical methods. Natural controls, such as weather or topography, limit pest populations by affecting the environment in which they exist. Biological controls, such as predators and parasites, can injure or consume target pests to manage population sizes. Chemical controls may reduce the need for more drastic measures by modifying the chemistry of the environment in which the target pest exists. Chemicals can be used to directly impact the pest population, altering its access to environmental factors, or they can be designed to degrade or bind to the physical properties of the target organism, thereby impeding the ability of the pest to reproduce or thrive.
Many of these methods require ongoing maintenance, monitoring and reporting. Some have negative impacts on native organisms that are not pests and the environment, or may have unintended consequences (e.g. reducing biodiversity and disrupting food chains).
As with the other pest control methods, eradication must be approached at community, regional and global levels and requires extensive financial and human resources. Even successful eradication programs have had failures, including the emergence of new microbes from unforeseen reservoirs or vaccine strain reversion (a problem currently facing polio eradication efforts). It is important to understand these risks and to avoid strategies that could lead to the unintended reintroduction of targeted organisms to areas where they have been eliminated. These include reintroducing an enemy to a region where it has been exterminated, or returning to use insecticides in areas where they have been replaced with non-toxic alternatives.
Natural Forces
Pest control involves minimizing the effects of pests on people, crops, and the environment. Ideally, we should only need to control a pest when its numbers or damage cross thresholds that we consider unacceptable. These thresholds may be based on esthetic, economic, or health concerns. Thresholds also vary by climate and region.
A pest’s natural enemies — parasites, predators, pathogens — are important tools in controlling it. Incorporating more of these natural forces into our pest management strategy can reduce the need for toxic chemicals and their side effects. The challenge is to design these natural control agents to be effective and efficient as replacements for synthetic pesticides. The biotechnology industry offers a range of promising products including genetically manipulated pathogens and parasitoids and semiochemicals such as pheromones that attract natural enemies. However, despite their appeal as biofriendly alternatives to chemical pesticides, they are still therapeutic tools and should be used only as backups for our primary effort to maximize built in pest reduction features of the ecosystem.
Other preventive actions, such as crop rotations, avoiding large scale monocropping, leaving field margins unsprayed, and providing year round refuges for natural enemies, can help to keep pest populations at low levels. The key is to recognize that prevention is more effective than suppression and eradication. It costs less to avoid pests than to control them.
Eradication is rarely a goal in outdoor pest situations, except when a new pest has been accidentally introduced and needs to be controlled before it establishes itself in a wide area. It is more often the objective in indoor pest situations, such as when food processing or food storage facilities must be kept free of rodents or other critters.
Developing a more active, holistic approach to managing pests that includes habitat management and cultural management is essential to reducing the need for pesticides. The use of trait-based archetype models, in which the results from correlative studies are translated into the causal relationships that drive mechanistic model development from landscape to global scales, could be an effective means of mainstreaming natural pest control (Overmars et al., 2019).
