Pest Control Woodland Hills CA involves:
- Preventing pests from becoming a problem.
- Suppressing them when they occur.
- Eradicating them when they become unacceptable.
It should cause as little harm as possible to people, pets, property, and the environment.
Keep your house clean to prevent attracting bugs and rodents. Avoid piles of newspapers or magazines, and keep trash away from the house. Repair any leaky pipes or outdoor water sources that might attract water-loving pests.
As everyone knows, pests can be a huge nuisance, but they also seriously threaten human health. Rodents, for example, gnaw on wires and destroy property while spreading diseases like hantavirus, leptospirosis, Salmonella, and more. Cockroaches are known to cause food poisoning and respiratory problems. Pests can also be a significant business risk for retail, restaurant, and office environments, where they can damage inventory, scare customers, and threaten employee or customer safety.
The best way to deal with any pest problem is prevention. This is usually easier than eradication and helps keep people and property safe. Preventive pest control tactics include:
- Inspecting for signs of pest infestations.
- Closing off entry points.
- Regularly caulking cracks and crevices.
It is also important to inspect food shipments and to make sure that employees are properly trained in food handling, cleaning, and pest repellant defenses.
Pest prevention often involves the use of biological controls, which involve the release of natural enemies to suppress or even eliminate pests. This can be accomplished through predators, parasites, or pathogens that target specific pest species. It can also be done through physical barriers such as screens or traps. In addition, it is usually a good idea to remove any items that may provide hiding or breeding places for pests, such as stacks of paper or cardboard in the attic, overflowing garbage bins, and trays under house plants.
Another important aspect of prevention is regular scouting for and identifying pests, which can be done daily to weekly depending on the type of pest. This allows for early detection, and it can help reduce reliance on, and the risk of, chemical pesticides.
A combination of preventive and eradication treatments is generally the best approach to pest management. Relying solely on pesticides can be counter-productive because some pest populations develop resistance, and they can also harm living organisms and the environment at the treatment site. It is also wise to try to use least-toxic methods whenever possible, as this reduces the risks to humans, pets, and the environment.
Suppression
Pests cause damage and interfere with desired organisms, often requiring treatment to restore balance. There are three goals of pest control: prevention, suppression, and eradication. Prevention is the most desirable goal because it means not letting a problem develop. However, pests are often a fact of life in urban and rural environments, so some level of pest control is necessary. Suppression reduces pest numbers to an acceptable level and minimizes harm. Eradication is rarely attempted in outdoor pest situations, because it is extremely difficult to achieve. However, in indoor areas such as dwellings; schools, offices, and health care, food processing, and food preparation facilities; and the food supply, eradication may be possible.
Physical controls, such as traps, screens, fences, and barriers, help to keep pests out of some environments. Devices that alter the environment, such as radiation and heat, can also be used to help prevent or control pests. The use of pheromones can also be helpful in controlling some pests. Pheromones mimic the chemical signals that female insects send out to attract males, and releasing these chemicals can confuse the males and lead to reduced reproduction.
In addition, natural enemies of pests can be used to suppress their populations. Birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, mammals, and other predatory or parasitic species feed on pests and control their numbers. Insects, plant-eating pests, and weeds can also be attacked by pathogens (bacteria, fungi, viruses, or protozoans) that slow their growth, inhibit reproduction, or kill them.
Chemicals can be used to control pests when prevention and other control tactics are not effective. It is important to understand the risks involved in the use of any pesticide, and to always follow all label instructions and safety warnings carefully.
When using pesticides, be sure to target your application to specific locations, and never saturate an area with spray or fogging devices. This can contaminate the soil and water in the surrounding area, and may even be hazardous to pets and children. The best way to minimize the risk of pesticide exposure is to remove the conditions that favor their development, such as clogged gutters, leaky faucets, and stacks of lumber and paper. Regularly removing garbage and compost materials can also lower the chances of pests breeding in or moving into your home or business.
Eradication
A pesticide’s ability to control a target organism depends on several factors including the type of chemical, its mode of action, and the ability of the target organism to develop resistance. A pesticide’s effectiveness may also depend on its timing of application. If too much of a pesticide is applied, the target pest will often survive and the chemical’s efficacy will decline rapidly. Ineffective spraying, such as when a pesticide is applied too soon, can lead to overkill, which may result in the loss of beneficial insects that would otherwise control the target pest population. The use of pesticides can also be harmful to wildlife, which may eat the target species or get poisoned from contact with the chemicals.
In integrated pest management (IPM), targets are set for acceptable levels of pest damage rather than attempting to eradicate all pests. This approach allows a diversity of organisms to coexist in the same environment, which is less likely to suffer from major pest outbreaks than an ecosystem with few species.
When IPM targets are not met, pest control actions are undertaken. The goal is to keep the pest populations below their damaging thresholds, and this usually involves monitoring and scouting to determine the type of insect and its population level accurately. The threshold is then used to guide treatment decisions, which may include mechanical, cultural, biological, or chemical controls, or a combination of these.
Achieving acceptable pest levels requires understanding the ecological systems that govern a microbe’s ability to spread among its host plants, vectors, and intermediary hosts. The reproductive rate of a disease-causing microbe is determined by multiple local factors, and the intervention-altered reproduction rate must be maintained below 1.0.
Eradication can be difficult, but a good example of successful eradication is the United States’s Boll weevil eradication program for cotton. This program was successful because of a thorough understanding of the biology of the weevil, support and cost sharing from the cotton industry, and regular estimation of the varroa mite population to discover when treatment is needed. The term eradicate can be misleading, as it implies the total destruction of an organism. A more accurate definition of the word, based on its origins, is to uproot or remove something, which stresses the idea of removal rather than destruction.
Monitoring
A basic component of IPM programs is monitoring (scouting). This involves regularly searching for and identifying pests and the damage they cause. It also involves determining when the pest population has reached or is approaching a threshold level at which control action must be taken. Threshold levels are set based on economic and environmental factors, including crop stage, management practices, and weather conditions.
To accurately monitor pests, a trained employee must understand the life cycle of each species and be able to distinguish injury caused by environmental stresses from those caused by insect feeding. A variety of monitoring methods are available. Some methods are relatively fast and easy to use while others are more time consuming and require more training.
Traps, both passive and active, are widely used for monitoring pests. Passive traps include pheromone, volatile and light traps. Some traps are specially shaped to exploit the behavior of certain groups of pests, such as stored product pests and flies. These traps may be used in combination with a visual inspection.
Active traps such as baited or “sticky” traps require more specialized skills to use properly. They are usually more time consuming to inspect than passive traps. They also require more regular and consistent care to prevent overfilling, leaking or spilling. Some of these traps are especially useful in capturing pests such as earwigs and wireworms.
Other traps are used for monitoring weeds and nematodes. These are often easier to inspect than a field crop. The frequency of these traps is based on the type of pest being monitored and the environment.
Monitoring is essential to a pest control program because it helps the pest manager identify problem areas and determine when the problem is most likely to occur. It also allows the pest manager to evaluate whether treatment has been effective and adjust strategies when needed.
In the past, forecasting of pest outbreaks was done by manually observing and counting insects at selected points in a field. This method is very time consuming and has low accuracy. A new system has been designed that enables real-time insect identification and collection of pest information. The data can then be used for early warning and forecasting of pest outbreaks.
