Maria Allen
We call pests animals or plants that harm people in a particular way. They can infest vegetables or fruit, but also wood or living spaces and their furnishings. If they infect humans themselves, we tend to call them “pathogens”.
Pests develop primarily where man has interfered with nature. People like to cultivate large fields with one and the same crop, for example, corn. It’s called a monoculture. However, this throws nature out of balance and gives individual species of living beings the opportunity to reproduce rapidly. These species then eat everything bare. That’s what we humans call pests.
But for nature, there is no distinction between beneficial and harmful. Everything that lives contributes to the cycle of life. But people mostly see it for their own benefit. They often fight pests with poisons. When there are pests in the house, you often have to use a pest controller.
What types of pests are there?
The pests in fruit, vegetables, grain, or potatoes are called agricultural pests: aphids cause leaves to wither, fungi destroy strawberry crops or vineyards, rabbits in Australia or mice eat entire gardens and fields bare.
In the forest, there are forest pests. The best-known of these is the bark beetle, which builds its tunnels under tree bark and thus causes the tree to dry up and die. The oak moth is a butterfly whose larvae kill trees that were usually already weak.
When mice or rats get at our supplies, we speak of storage pests. This includes the clothes moth. This is a butterfly that eats holes in our clothes as a larva. Mold is also part of it when it makes our bread or jam inedible.
The cockroach or cockroach is particularly feared. This insect grows to 12 to 15 millimeters in our country. It particularly likes to live in our food, but also in clothes. The cockroach not only makes our supplies inedible. Their saliva, skin, and fecal debris can also contain pathogens. These can trigger allergies, eczema, and asthma.
But there are also plant pests that attack the living spaces directly. Various types of mold are feared. These are special mushrooms. Once they have spread into walls or furniture, a specialist is usually needed: In this case, however, it is not the pest control company, but a specialized construction company.