Look for a company that prioritizes pest identification. Ask about credentials, including state licenses and membership in reputable industry associations.
Biotic controls use natural enemies to keep pest populations below damaging levels. These strategies must be integrated into farming systems. They involve understanding relationships among species diversity, pest and natural enemy communities, and agricultural landscapes. Contact Pest Control Sparta NJ now!
Pests present a nuisance and can damage property. They can also be a health risk, introducing diseases like hantavirus, leptospirosis and salmonella. They can cause allergic reactions, bites and stings, such as from earwigs, silverfish, house centipedes, ants and fleas. They stain and discolor surfaces, such as pine seed bugs, boxelder bugs and bed bugs. They can create unpleasant odors, such as from rodent droppings and urine.
Prevention is the key to controlling pests. It involves assessing the environment and removing or blocking access to food, water and shelter. It can include pest proofing buildings, adjusting ventilation, eliminating weeds and debris, inspecting and regularly emptying trash cans and drains, and creating sanitary conditions. It may involve trapping and monitoring for pests, such as rodents, birds, bats, mosquitoes, flies, ticks and spiders.
Scouting and monitoring for pests may be done on a routine basis, ranging from daily to weekly. This involves looking for and identifying pests (or their signs), and assessing their numbers and the degree of damage they are causing. It is a critical part of IPM, and it can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of control measures and determine whether or when additional controls are needed.
Preventing pests can be difficult, especially for businesses such as restaurants and museums where people are constantly coming and going. Good building maintenance and sanitation helps to reduce the likelihood of pest infestation, and quarantine, inspection, and treatment of artifacts that enter museum storage and display areas can also help.
The best way to prevent pests in the first place is by ensuring that they do not have access to food, water or shelter. This means keeping trash cans and drains closed as much as possible, avoiding weeds and debris that could provide rodent hiding places or breeding sites, and making sure to sweep up leaves and other litter regularly. It also means keeping doors and windows closed as much as possible, and keeping food in tightly sealed containers or in the refrigerator. It is also important to regularly clean floors and surfaces to remove attractants such as crumbs, spills, and sticky spots.
Suppression
Pest control relies on the interaction of natural forces and human management. This type of control is most often accomplished by monitoring pest numbers and reducing the availability of food, water or shelter for them. This is sometimes referred to as preventive pest control. Some examples of preventive actions include removing crop residues, improving sanitation in fields and food-handling areas, and decontaminating equipment between crops or harvests. Other preventive measures include using pest-free seed and properly storing harvested produce.
Monitoring pests involves determining when a population of insect, weed or vertebrate pest has reached harmful levels. This may be done by trapping or scouting. Observing weather conditions can also help determine when an outbreak of a pest is likely to occur. For example, a change in temperature or moisture levels can affect the activity of insect pests or the growth rate of their host plants.
A key to suppressing a pest population is to reduce its average reproductive capacity. This can be done by lowering the number of progeny that survive to reproduce, or by causing the population to reach a new equilibrium level through sterility or excess mortality. The optimum method for doing this depends on the size of the target population and its cost to control it. The economic threshold level (ETL) is defined as the point at which the cost of control action is prohibitive.
Biological control relies on the interaction of natural enemies with the pest, including predation, parasitism and herbivory. These predators, parasitoids and herbivores are often introduced from other locations to augment the native populations in an area. Alternatively, the predators and parasitoids may be bred in a laboratory and released in the field. Classical biological control usually involves the introduction of organisms in small, repeated batches or in a single large-scale release to obtain long-term control.
A farm’s landscape can influence the performance of natural enemy guilds and thereby pest control. For example, complex landscapes tend to support more diversity among insect natural enemies. This in turn can lead to greater control of a pest by reducing antagonistic interactions between the predators and parasitoids, such as intraguild predation.
Eradication
The goal of eradication is to reduce a pest population to zero. It is an extremely difficult goal to achieve in outdoor situations where pests have become established, but it can occasionally be achieved through aggressive strategies like mass spraying with chemicals. Eradication is often used in conjunction with prevention and suppression.
Chemical Chemical pest control involves the use of solutions that are toxic to the targeted pest. Examples include repellents, which deter the pests by making it unpleasant or dangerous to be in an area, and insecticides that kill them. These solutions can be sprayed, poured or applied to a surface that the pests inhabit. These types of solutions are typically easier to find and apply, and can offer immediate results. They can, however, pose health and environmental risks to humans if they are not used properly.
Physical
Traps, netting and decoys are some examples of physical pest control methods. These usually require human interaction to set them up and retrieve the trap or bait. They can also be time consuming and labor intensive. Physical pest control can be effective, but it is a good idea to partner with a professional company who can handle the maintenance for you.
Biological
Biological pest control involves the use of living organisms to target or remove pest infestations. This can be anything from natural predators, to parasites, or even viruses. Biological pest control does not involve the use of any chemicals, so it can be safer for the environment and people. It can be a slower method, though, as it relies on the population of the targeted predator to grow and take over the role of eliminating the pests. It is also less likely to work in environments where the conditions are not right for the predator to thrive. Examples of this would be an area with a lot of competition from other wildlife that could interfere with the predator’s population growth. For example, ladybugs are natural predators of aphids, but they cannot survive in areas with a lot of other insects competing for the same resources.
Biological Control
Biological control is the intentional use of predators, parasitoids and pathogens to suppress pest populations. NIFA supports research in bio-based pest management that aims to provide safer and more effective methods of controlling weeds, insects, mites, plant pathogens, and other nuisance organisms while reducing our dependence on synthetic chemicals.
Some of the most successful biological control programs utilize natural enemies already present in a landscape, rather than importing them from another region or even another country. This practice, called conservation biological control, requires careful pest identification to ensure that the biological control agent species is specific enough to attack only the target organism and does not have side effects on native biodiversity.
Importation biological control involves introducing natural enemies from the exotic pest’s country of origin to re-establish predator-prey relationships. The process is very rigorous and requires extensive research conducted under quarantine to ensure that unwanted organisms, such as diseases or hyperparasites, are not imported along with the pest control agent. Depending on the complexity of the program, this may take several years before the new population is ready to be released.
Once the new population of natural enemies is established, it can be released into the environment to suppress pest populations. This can be done by spraying, drenching or depositing the control agents in the field. The method used varies by the species. For example, larger agents such as predatory mites or parasitoids are often applied in a loose carrier such as bran, while microbial biological control agents are typically drenched into soil or plant tissue.
In some cases, the goal is to delay a pest until it is too late for its damaging effects, similar to how chemical pesticides are sometimes used to provide a rapid knock-down effect. This can be accomplished by introducing biological controls at critical times in the life cycle of the pest, such as just prior to bud burst or flowering.
Biological control is most effective when it is part of an overall management system that includes cultural and production practices that provide habitat and food for the natural enemy, such as maintaining a diversity of plants in the field or landscape. These practices also help reduce weed competition, which can inhibit natural enemy growth and function.
