Coquitlam Pest Control manages pests that can cause hygiene problems in homes and food preparation areas. These include rodents (rats and mice), crawling insects such as ants and centipedes, and flying insects such as flies, moths, and bees.
When hiring someone to perform pest control, ask for proof that they use non-toxic methods. Also, ensure they properly dispose of any chemicals and their containers.
Pest identification is the first step of any integrated pest management (IPM) program. Identifying insects, weeds, plant diseases, and vertebrate animals is essential for determining appropriate and effective control tactics. Incorrect identification could result in unnecessary pesticide use and environmental impact.
IPM programs include monitoring, prevention, suppression, and eradication of pests. Monitoring means checking a field, landscape, garden, or building to find out which pests are present and how severe their damage is. Observing the pests’ behavior and life cycles also helps predict whether or not they are likely to reach threshold levels that will require control.
To determine whether or not a problem is worth controlling, consider the following:
Does the pest’s damage detract from the beauty of the garden? If so, controlling it may be justified. But if the damage is minimal and caused late in the season, or if it results from something other than the pest, it is unlikely to affect the health of the plants and might not be worth the expense of controlling the pest.
Are the pests’ natural enemies present? In most cases, natural enemies are important parts of a healthy ecosystem. If you apply a pesticide, it is vital that the population of the natural enemy be high enough to suppress the pest population after treatment. If not, the pests will rebound uninhibited by their natural enemies, and their numbers will be too high to control with traditional methods.
Once you have accurately identified a pest, consult the appropriate reference book or online resource to find out what the best way is to control it. If you are going to use a pesticide, follow the label instructions closely. It is also important to mix the product according to the recommended rate and to wear all necessary protective gear as indicated on the label. Finally, be sure to choose a pesticide that is registered for the specific insect species or disease that you are targeting. Otherwise, you will risk damaging other plants or organisms that you do not want to harm. This includes other pests, beneficial insects, and wildlife that may be using the same environment as the target plant or disease.
Prevention
Pests threaten the health of people and their property. They can carry diseases and cause allergic reactions in people. They can also contaminate food and damage buildings or crops. Prevention includes steps like pest proofing – keeping pests out of the home, garden or workplace by eliminating their access to food, water and shelter. It also involves removing the pests’ breeding grounds. This can include removing rubbish, cleaning drains, and repairing leaky plumbing. It can also involve the use of physical control methods like traps and bait stations – although they are usually only effective when they are checked regularly and the pests trapped and removed.
In general, preventing pests is more cost-effective than controlling them once they have become established. Pests are more difficult to eliminate once they have become well established in an area, particularly outdoors, and can persist for long periods. Eradication is generally only attempted in outdoor situations where a particular pest poses a significant threat to the environment or human health. This is often the case with plants such as invasive species or disease-carrying insects like fruit flies, gypsy moths and Mediterranean fruit flies.
Prevention is most successful when it is based on monitoring and threshold-based decision-making. By regularly searching for, identifying and assessing pests, it is possible to predict when they will reach nuisance or problem levels that require management action. This information can help decide whether a pest can be tolerated or needs to be controlled, and what management strategy should be employed.
Thresholds are set based on the pest’s biology and environmental conditions, and on knowledge about the kind of damage that may be caused by the pest. A threshold is used to determine when control is needed and what kinds of physical, biological or chemical techniques should be applied.
Preventive treatments by a pest control professional are essential in areas where pests pose serious risks to health and safety. For example, a termite infestation can cause structural damage to buildings and lead to unsafe living or working conditions. Rodents can gnaw through electrical wiring and start fires. A pest infestation can also cause problems in museums and other collections, compromising the integrity of artifacts and increasing their risk of decay or damage. Continual inspections by a qualified pest control professional will identify the presence of pests and prevent them from becoming a major problem.
Suppression
Pests interfere with human activities or cause damage that threatens safety or health. Pests are invertebrates (insects, aphids, caterpillars, grasshoppers) or vertebrates (rodents, birds, bats). They can also be plants that are considered weeds or disease vectors that may carry pathogens and cause diseases that threaten crops, people or animals.
There are a number of different pest control strategies, and it’s important to understand how they relate to each other. Preventing pests is the best way to protect your crops and the environment, but if prevention doesn’t work, suppression techniques can help reduce numbers to an acceptable level.
Threshold-based decision making is key to selecting the most appropriate control method. Regularly checking your field, landscape or building-or other site-to identify pests, their numbers and the harm they cause will help you determine whether they can be tolerated or need to be controlled. This monitoring can be done through scouting, trapping or by inspecting crop damage. Monitoring can also include studying the biology of the pests, their habitat and environmental conditions to predict when they will reach an unacceptable threshold.
Invasive species are organisms that are introduced to an environment where they don’t naturally occur and have adverse impacts on native species. The impacts can be ecological (such as the extinction of native species), environmental (including changes to ecosystem function) or economic.
Biological pest control is the conserving or releasing of natural enemies of pests to suppress their populations. Examples of this are the release of predators that feed on mite pests in orchards, nematodes that kill harmful soil grubs or wasps that parasitize greenhouse whitefly.
Physical controls use barriers, nets, traps, screens and other devices to physically intercept or prevent pests from entering a space. These controls can be used on their own or in combination with other types of control methods.
Chemical controls involve the direct application of pesticides to a pest population to reduce it or to prevent them from damaging a plant, product or property. Generally, they are applied using baits, traps or spot spraying, and with great care to limit their exposure to children and pets. On the extreme end of the scale are chemical fumigations, which seal a building and then spreads a fine mist of pesticide to annihilate any lingering pests.
Eradication
Eradication is defined as the permanent reduction to zero worldwide of infection caused by a specific agent. This is a more ambitious goal than suppression or containment, and one that requires a much larger effort in terms of financial, logistical, and political resources. Eradication efforts must occur at local, community, national, regional and global levels. The disease must be completely eradicated from all locations, and this eradication must include the independent natural host populations that are necessary for the pathogen’s life cycle. This is the only way to truly eradicate a disease. Examples of diseases that have been wiped out from the world are smallpox and rinderpest.
Eradication is only possible if effective intervention tools are available. These tools must be both sufficiently sensitive to detect any presence of the disease and simple enough to be applied in large numbers by laboratories worldwide. Eradication also depends on surveillance systems that can rapidly detect new infections and interrupt transmission of the disease before it can spread to a large population.
A good example of a control tool is the vaccine. Vaccines provide protection against the disease by stimulating an immune response that neutralizes the pathogen. Vaccines can be used to protect against both the infectious and asymptomatic forms of the disease.
Biological pest control, which relies on predation, parasitism, herbivory, or other natural mechanisms, can also be an important part of any pest management strategy. Classical biological control involves finding and breeding suitable natural enemies of the pest, then releasing them in the field. These natural enemies can be released in small batches, in a single large release, or both. The release is carefully planned to optimize the natural enemy-pest relationship and to minimize disturbance of the environment.
A significant challenge for any pest control program is to understand the complex interaction between organisms and their environment. This includes the role of the microbe’s natural reservoirs, its intermediacy hosts and human host populations, and the environmental conditions that affect the rate at which it transmits to new populations. A fundamental understanding of these factors is required to improve the efficiency of control programs.