Urban Pest Management: the Need for a Correct Mixture of Knowledge and Practice - Urban Insect Pests: Sustainable Management Strategies - page 201

information must be relevant to the pest
management industry and must be linked
with pragmatic management practices to
produce an effective knowledge-based man-
agement programme.
Pest management practices are relatively
simple in design and application but their
success depends on the rigorous under-
standing of the natural laws that govern the
abundance of insect pests and regulate
their interactions with all other facets of
the environment. Urban ecology, defi ned
as the study of the relationship between
living organisms and their surrounding
urban landscapes, is a newly emerging
scientifi c fi eld that promises to provide the
pest management industry with the
information it needs to engage in eco-
logically based pest management. Urban
ecology is a recent fi eld compared to
ecology as a whole because ecology has
historically focused on more natural
environments. The growing awareness that
urban systems represent a habitat where
biological principles operate just as they
do in more natural systems is contributing
to the emergence of urban ecology as an
independent scientifi c fi eld.
The goal of urban ecology is to study the
relationship of living organisms with their
surrounding urban environment. In the
past, knowledge of pest biology has allowed
the researchers to develop better methods to
target specifi c urban pests. For example,
knowledge of cockroach harbourage, feed-
ing preferences and foraging behaviour has
helped to develop crack-and-crevice treat-
ments and baiting technologies that
replaced broadcast liquid spray treatments.
In essence, the knowledge of pest behaviour
can be used to achieve satisfactory results
while reducing pesticide inputs.
Much has been learned about the biology
of urban pests but much more remains to be
discovered and older fi ndings need to be
revised based on new knowledge. Urban
habitats are extremely dynamic, non-
equilibrium settings that can lead to rapid
evolutionary change in the insect pests that
inhabit these systems. Indeed, the rate of
human-mediated evolution can sometimes
exceed the rate of natural evolution by

orders of magnitude (Reznick et al. , 1990).
As a result, pest biology in urban habitats is
a dynamic fi eld and new developments in
pest biology are constantly challenging the
pest management industry. For example,
crack-and-crevice bait treatments may still
be the best way to target indoor cockroach
populations but recent developments in
cockroach biology such as insecticide
resistance (Gondhalekar and Scharf, 2012)
and bait aversion (Wang et al., 2004) are
limiting the effectiveness of cockroach
control and stimulating efforts to develop
new tools for pest management.
The overall goal of urban ecology with
regard to the pest management industry is
to produce information about pests that is
relevant to the industry. Ideally, this infor-
mation would then be used in ecologically
based pest management that makes full use
of natural and cultural processes and
methods. For example, the management of
subterranean termites in urban environ-
ments can be vastly improved by under-
standing the social and spatial structure of
termite colonies. This is especially true
when baiting technologies are used, which
attempt to manage termite populations
without the use of exclusionary barrier
treatments (Forschler and Jenkins, 2000).
Subterranean termites are highly cryptic
social insects that live in colonies com-
prising hundreds of thousands of indi-
viduals. A single colony may inhabit a
diffuse network of tunnels connecting
numerous feeding sites (Forschler and
Jenkins, 1999). Older nesting and feeding
sites are frequently abandoned in favour of
sites that offer improved conditions, thus
the colony is constantly on the move.
Furthermore, previous research has shown
that neighbouring colonies can fuse, or
termites from several neighbouring colonies
may share resources but maintain separate
affi liations. Also mature colonies may frag-
ment, become spatially isolated and eventu-
ally function as independent colonies
(DeHeer and Vargo, 2008). Such knowledge
has signifi cantly benefi ted the pest manage-
ment industry by improving the effi cacy of
termite treatments, reducing pesticide use
and ultimately allowing the industry to