Morristown Pest Control involves preventing or controlling unwanted organisms. Its goal is to reduce pest numbers and damage to an acceptable level.
Access: Pests must have food, water, and shelter to survive. Household crumbs, pet feces, plant material, and indoor clutter are all survival necessities for some pests.
Biological control leverages natural predators and parasites to manage pests. Examples include releasing ladybugs to eat aphids and spraying beneficial nematodes on plants (e.g., roach-eating Steinernema carpocapsae).
Prevention
Pests are more than just unwelcome house guests. They can spread disease and germs that are dangerous to human health and can also do serious damage to property. The best way to deal with pests is to prevent them from entering in the first place.
Preventive pest control involves modifying the environment to deter pests and their offspring. This may involve blocking their access to food, water and shelter. It can also include using a combination of these and other techniques. Some examples of preventive controls are screens on windows, keeping doors closed and patching holes in walls and roofs. Regular cleaning to remove crumbs, garbage, and other attractants can help deter pests as well.
Some pests, such as fleas, ticks, and rodents, carry germs that can cause illness in humans. Such diseases can range from tapeworms to Lyme disease. Pests can also damage property, such as wood and wires, leaving behind unsightly marks and odors. In addition, some pests like rats and mice can gnaw on electrical wires, which poses a fire hazard.
In open environments, preventive controls are easier to implement than in buildings or other confined spaces. However, it is still essential to monitor and evaluate a site. This can include identifying what types of pests are present, their numbers, and the amount of damage they have caused. This information will be useful in determining whether or not the pests should be controlled and, if so, what kind of controls are necessary.
Monitoring can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a control strategy. This includes evaluating the benefits and risks of each tactic or combination of tactics. It also involves assessing environmental factors, such as weather and pest behavior, that might influence the success of a management plan.
Depending on the type of pest, eradication can be a difficult goal to achieve in outdoor settings. This is because of the wide variety of natural and human-induced factors that influence pest populations. However, it is sometimes possible to eradicate a pest in indoor settings such as dwellings; schools; offices; and food processing, preparation and storage facilities.
Suppression
Pest control focuses on reducing pest populations to levels that will cause less harm than the damage caused by the pest. This goal may be accomplished through prevention, suppression, or eradication (destroying the entire population of the pest). Prevention and suppression are the most desirable forms of pest control. Control strategies must be chosen carefully to avoid causing more harm than necessary. Accurate identification of the pest is critical to choosing the most appropriate tactic or combination of tactics for any situation.
Cultural practices, physical barriers and biological controls are often used to prevent or suppress pests. These are strategies that change the environment, condition of the host plant or behavior of the pest to reduce the risk of infestation. Examples include crop rotation, plowing between fields, varying planting or harvesting dates, planting trap crops, tillage and weed management, and pruning, thinning, and fertilization of cultivated plants.
Physical barriers can include netting, screens and fences to keep out insects that damage fruit in orchards, greenhouses and other enclosed structures, and mulch to inhibit weeds in vegetable beds. Biological controls include the use of natural enemies such as predators, parasitoids and pathogens to kill or parasitize the target pest. In general, the use of biological control agents can be less harmful to the environment and human health than chemical pesticides. However, there is a lag between the increased abundance of the natural enemy and the impact on pests. In addition, a population of natural enemies is limited in its ability to accommodate excess mortality or sterility, so a reduction in the density of a pest population is not necessarily a permanent removal of the pest.
Biological controls can be augmented by the purchase and release of new enemies such as nematodes that kill harmful soil grubs or wasps that attack greenhouse whiteflies. PPQ funds several biological control programs in which researchers import, screen, develop, release, implement and monitor organisms that can be used to prevent the establishment of, slow the spread or manage a pest of economic, environmental or regulatory importance.
Relative density of natural enemies in agricultural areas can be influenced by the proximity of seminatural habitats that support them. For example, the abundance of parasitoids overwintering in sun-grown Brazilian coffee and oilseed rape fields was significantly greater when the fields were separated by forest patches.
Detection
Pest detection is a critical component of pest control. It allows for timely intervention, reducing crop damage and optimizing resource use. It also helps prevent pest populations from reaching dangerous levels, avoiding the need for excessive use of chemical controls.
Pest control professionals rely on several methods to identify potential infestations, including visual inspections of the property. This enables them to spot early signs of pest activity such as droppings, gnaw marks and nests, while also detecting moisture damage that could be attracting pests. Additional tools, such as thermal imaging cameras and sewer snake cameras, help to detect hidden pest entry points. Moisture meters are also helpful in identifying areas of excess moisture, which can lead to structural damage and create a breeding ground for pests.
Currently, most pest detection is done through passive traps placed in and around a property based on random sightings of insect feces or other physical evidence of a pest infestation. However, this is time consuming and relies on a person’s ability to notice the presence of a pest. Fortunately, new technologies such as pest detection apps, computer vision and UAV-based systems are improving the speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness of pest detection.
For example, a mobile application developed by Penn State University allows users to upload photos of pests, and the app will instantly identify them using artificial intelligence algorithms. Similarly, a smartphone app created by the University of Georgia can automatically identify cockroaches and other pests through software analysis. Moreover, a mobile application by Spectrum Technology uses image recognition and drone sensors to monitor crop health and pests in fields, and provides recommendations for controlling them.
A key method of preventing the spread of pests is known as Systematic Insect Trapping (SIT), which involves placing baited traps in strategic locations to target pests at all life stages, from egg to larva to adult. It is highly effective, and has helped eradicate harmful pests in many countries. For instance, SIT was instrumental in eliminating the Mediterranean fruit fly or Medfly, a common pest of many fruits and vegetables, from North America, Mexico, Australia, and other nations.
Eradication
The objective of pest control is usually to eliminate unwanted organisms from an area and prevent their recolonization. Eradication can be achieved with many techniques: physical removal or destruction; exclusion or quarantine; repulsion, mowing, and herbicides. It requires a long-term commitment and may require repeated applications of a variety of control methods. Eradication is a challenging goal because of a wide range of factors that influence transmission and the ecology of microbes in their human hosts. A thorough understanding of these factors is needed for optimizing control strategies.
For example, some invasive foreign weeds are so widespread in the Sutter County landscape that they threaten to contaminate hay, costing farmers millions of dollars annually. They also obliterate habitat for wildlife, disrupt natural processes, and compete with crops and native plants. Consequently, the Sutter County Agriculture Department encourages landowners to aggressively eradicate these species to protect our agricultural and wildland resources.
Biological control uses natural enemies — predators, parasites, and pathogens — to suppress pest populations. These natural enemies occur naturally in the environment but their numbers may need to be supplemented by releasing additional natural enemies or introducing enemies that did not exist in the target area before.
Chemical pesticides are substances that poison or otherwise kill pests, either by attacking the nervous system or disrupting the metabolic process. Some chemical pesticides are sprayed on the surface of plant foliage, while others are injected into the soil or water supply. Generally, only trained and licensed pest control technicians should be allowed to use chemical pesticides. They must wear protective clothing, including face masks, gloves, and overalls, and carefully follow the product label to minimize the risks of contamination and injury to people and other animals.
The dictionary defines the word eradicate as “pull up or out by the roots, remove completely, destroy, extirpate.” However, many of us associate the term more with eradication’s meaning of “extirpate, annihilate, obliterate,” and this ambiguity can invite misunderstanding. Thus, in this chapter we prefer to use the more precise term elimination (defined as controlling the reproduction rate of a pest to below its natural level) when discussing eradication strategies.
