The Ecology of Insect Pest Control

For the last 50 years, the development and use of a range of powerful synthetic insecticides has dominated thinking about pest control. When DDT was first developed in 1939, it was believed that pest insects problems were a thing of the past. In the following years, insecticides were used, often indiscriminately, in ever greater volumes with little understanding of their impact on pest or beneficial insects. However, increasingly it is being realised that insecticides do not provide a panacea and that complete reliance on these chemicals brings with it a variety of associated problems, such as resistance and environmental contamination. Today, there is growing interest in the use of sustainable pest control, alternatives to insecticides and awareness that the use of any control technique, including chemical pesticides, requires a detailed understanding of the ecology of the pest insect and its environment. The aim of this book is to bring together modern concepts in insect ecology and population dynamics with the practical necessitites of insect pest control. It shows how ecological principles apply and should inform and direct pest management decisions.
The guiding theme of the book is that entomologists need to understand the basic ecology of a pest and what any control technique will do to the forces that regulate the abundance of that pest, before they can hope to approach sustainable pest management. focus is on ecological principles, in an applied context; the first occasion in which agriculatural, medical, veterinary and natural habitat pests are dealt with collectively