Biological Pest Control - Is it the solution to Pest Control-Related Environmental Concerns?

Biological Pest Control - Is it the solution to Pest Control-Related Environmental Concerns?

Before  pets  can get into attempting to understand whether biological pest control is the response to the pest-control related environmental concerns, it might be proper to give ourselves a little background info on this whole pest control business; for the benefit of those who could be encountering it for the very first time.

Now, pests are organisms (typically insects) which are injurious to the interests of individuals who refer to them as such. Thus to farmers, the insects that invade and eat up their crops (whether in the fields or during storage), will be termed as pests. However, the 'domestic insects' that have a tendency to mess up with things in domestic settings (like moths, that may mess up with cloths in storage), are seen as pests by housekeepers. Worth remember is that although most  pest s are insects, additionally, there are quite are number that are non-insects: with famous brands rodents (that can screw up with crops in farms of things stored in domestic settings) being seen as pests too, the point that they are not insects notwithstanding.

Having seen that pests are injurious, it will be natural that the people who happen to 'fall victim' to them would want to remove them. In the meantime, people who haven't yet fallen victim to pests will be keen to avoid this type of 'fate.' Hosting pests, incidentally, can be quite a serious fate: a large number of hectares of farmland have already been known to be wasted by pests in a single day, resulting in losses that often run into millions of dollars. It's the steps taken up to avoid pest invasion then, or even to resolve pest invasion if it has already taken place, which are referred to as constituting pest control.

Now pest control takes various forms, according to the pests one is wanting to eliminate (or to avoid the invasion of). Even though bigger pests like rodents may be controlled through mechanical means like trapping, for a long period of time, it really is chemical control which has worked for the vast majority of pests, which are generally insects as previous mentioned. The chemicals used in this endeavor are what are termed as pesticides. Even though pesticides are often very effective in pest-control, the downside in their mind tends to come up when we think about the fact that they are usually extremely environmentally unfriendly. Worth remember, at this point, may be the fact that the chemicals known as pesticides are generally very potent ones. So it often happens that traces of these remain where they were used, even with the pests are gone. Those traces are eventually washed down to the water bodies where they wreck great havoc to the (non pest) plants and animals resident in the water bodies.


It is concern concerning this environmental impact of chemical pest-control that led to questions concerning whether a far more environmentally friend way for controlling pests couldn't be developed. The end result was the exploration of alternatives just like the biological pest control, which we have been trying to see whether it's really the answer to concerns raised about (chemical- based) pest control.

In biological pest-control, it is other organisms that are regarded as predators to the people viewed as pest that are unleashed upon the said pests; eating them up and therefore resolving the pest problem. Thus if the troublesome pests are aphids, another organisms that are known to feed on aphids are introduced in to the field where the problem is, to feed on the aphids, rather than spraying an environmentally unfriendly chemical.

The issue with biological pest-control, though, is that it tends to be of questionable efficiency. While chemical pest control tends to be thorough, leaving no pests or even traces of these, in biological pest control, that can't quite be assured. Implementing biological pest control on a large scale basis (for instance on a thousand hectare plantation) can also prove to be a herculean task. Ultimately, it really is considerations like these which make us keep on thinking about more environmentally friendly pest control approaches. This is due to biological pest control, while definitely being an approach that addresses the environmental concerns raised about chemical pest control, it doesn't seem to be efficient (or scalable) enough, generally in most people people's view.