Pest Control Thousand Oaks service protects plants, animals, and people from harmful insects, rodents, and other organisms. These organisms can cause disease, damage property, and threaten human safety.
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Accurate identification of the pests infesting your property is an important first step in determining whether a control program is needed. Proper identification can tell you what the pest eats, how it breeds, and what environmental and harborage conditions it prefers. Identifying a specific species also allows you to look up biological clues, such as how long the pest lives and what it looks like at different stages of its life cycle.
Sometimes, identification may be as simple as recognizing the pest itself. In other cases, it may involve careful monitoring and observation of the pest to see how many there are, when they appear, and what damage they have caused. Knowing a pest’s biology also helps you decide whether it can be tolerated and the best management strategy.
Once you know what pests are infesting your property, you can work with Rentokil to find the right solution. This includes identifying which type of pest you have, as some insects, mites and weeds can be very similar and require the help of an expert to distinguish between them. In fact, some of the most common pests – cockroaches, termites and beetles, for example – can be mistaken for one another.
For example, the two moths most commonly found in UK homes doing damage to natural fibres – the blue bottle moth (Blomia cinerea) and the case-bearing clothes moth (Tineola bisselliella) – can both be identified by their distinctively shaped eggs.
Identification can also be helpful in determining the most effective time to apply control tactics. Most pests have “weak points” or windows of opportunity during their life cycles when they are most vulnerable to being controlled. This may be during early development in a seedling or late in the season when they are preparing for dormancy.
Using accurate information about the pest can eliminate the possibility of unnecessary chemical applications. It can also ensure that the proper pesticide is used, since it is likely that a general application will not be effective. Also, many pesticide failures are not due to resistance but rather because the wrong pesticide was applied at the incorrect time in the pest’s life cycle or environment.
Prevention
Pests can cause damage to property by destroying plant and animal materials, eating or chewing them or spreading disease. They can also threaten human health by transmitting bacteria and parasites that cause illness in humans or pets and may contaminate food, water and surfaces. Pests such as termites, bees and ants can eat away at wood structures causing structural instability and fire hazards. Rodents can gnaw through electrical wiring leading to fires and posing a threat to the safety of persons in and around buildings.
Preventive pest control techniques focus on eliminating conditions that attract and encourage pests. These include removing food, water and shelter; keeping surfaces clean; sealing cracks and crevices and repairing gaps; and conducting regular inspections and monitoring. The goal is to keep pest numbers at or below levels that are acceptable to the client.
In retail and hospitality settings, a pest free environment is essential for customer satisfaction. People are less likely to return if they see or smell pests in a restaurant or store. Taking the time to prevent pests can save money on cleaning and repair costs and improve the overall customer experience.
Food processing environments are attractive to pests because they provide food, water and shelter. Food processing pests can cause economic damage by contaminating foods with rodent droppings, insect parts and other debris or by introducing disease-causing organisms, e.g., microbial pathogens and intestinal worms. The presence of food processing pests can also be hazardous to human beings because they may pose a health risk through consumption or through exposure to the allergens they carry.
Prevention of pests in food processing environments involves a combination of sanitation, pest exclusion and chemical control measures. These include removing food sources, storing food in tightly closed containers, and keeping surfaces free of clutter where pests can hide. Garbage should be kept in covered bins and removed regularly. Cracks and crevices should be caulked or filled with steel wool. Water sources should be sealed and pipes insulated. Educating employees on pests and options for their control is an important part of prevention.
Suppression
The goal of pest control is to keep a crop or lawn at a productive level with minimal damage. To do that, you need to know when to take action, and what action to take. This means knowing the difference between prevention, suppression and eradication. Prevention keeps a pest from becoming a problem; suppression reduces pest numbers or damage to an acceptable level; and eradication destroys the pest population.
A good IPM program takes steps to monitor pest populations and environmental conditions to see when action is necessary. For insect, mollusk and vertebrate pests, this can be done through trapping or scouting. For weeds, this may be done through visual inspection and soil testing. Monitoring may also include checking environmental conditions such as temperature and moisture levels in the area being managed.
Once the threshold level for a pest is determined, the IPM program implements management practices to try and prevent the pest from reaching the action threshold. These methods are referred to as suppression strategies, and they may include cultural practices, sanitation techniques, mechanical controls, biological controls or chemical (pesticide) control.
Cultural practices are ways to change the environment or condition of a crop or lawn to make it less attractive to the pest. This includes things like crop rotation, varying time of planting and harvesting, using trap crops, pruning, thinning, mulching and effective manure management. Sanitation is a method that aims to deprive pests of food and shelter by reducing the amount of trash, garbage, or other potential sources of these materials in an area. It also includes avoiding long periods of high relative humidity, which encourages disease organisms to develop.
Biological control, sometimes called biocontrol, involves introducing a natural predator of an invasive pest species into an area where it does not exist to reduce its population. This technique has been used since ancient times, and it is still used today. For example, green lacewings (Chrysopidae) are released to attack aphids on citrus crops in many parts of the world.
A newer type of biological control uses a parasite that attacks the reproductive system of the target pest. This is a multi-generational approach, and it is thought that it may be more effective than traditional insecticides. The parasite works by modifying the genetic code of the host, usually through mutations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).
Eradication
Achieving eradication requires eliminating the pest to the point where it cannot return. It requires intensive control efforts on a wide area scale, requiring a significant commitment of financial and human resources. The cost-benefit analyses of eradication programs often suffer from biases that underestimate the costs and overestimate the benefits. This paper discusses the underlying issues that are associated with these costs and benefits and illustrates some specific examples from successful and failed eradication programs. The paper also compares eradication to ongoing area-wide control as a strategy for pest management and concludes that eradication is a challenging, but viable option.
Eradication involves the removal of all individuals of a pest species to a point where recolonization is unlikely to occur. This is a major undertaking, involving efforts at the local, national and international levels. Its success depends on the availability of resources and the ability to overcome a range of logistical problems, including failure to recognize that eradication is a long-term goal and that it will take time to complete. It also requires the ability to develop diagnostic tools that are sensitive enough to detect the presence of the pest, yet simple enough to be readily applied by laboratories with a range of capabilities and resources.
Biological control of insect pests focuses on the use of natural enemies to disrupt the life cycle of the pest by providing it with competing hosts or prey. The goal is to establish a population of natural enemies that will achieve a sustainable balance with the population of the pest. To do this, the natural enemy must be able to overwinter, a requirement that is not always feasible in the Northeast. This is why biocontrol in greenhouses usually requires that all potential habitat be removed at the end of each growing season.
There are only two diseases that have been officially eradicated from the world-smallpox caused by variola virus and rinderpest caused by rinderpest virus. Both diseases were widespread throughout the world until dedicated global efforts to eradicate them were undertaken. The World Health Organization defines eradication as “a permanent reduction to zero worldwide incidence of a particular disease through deliberate intervention.” It is estimated that smallpox was responsible for 300 million deaths throughout history, and rinderpest will have killed an even greater number.