Insects and People: Stored Product and Urban Insects

Urban Pests

  • Lots of different kind of urban pests
    • Infesting grains
    • Infesting Fruits and Veggies
    • Eating clothes
    • Blood feeding
    • Urban Entomologists: Study how we can get rid of pests in homes and urbanized settings

Stored “Dry” Food

  • Stored dry food is another monoculture
  • Insect-stored product pests destroy 10% of world’s food
  • Grains and grain products (wheat, corn, rice, flour, etc)
    • Biggest pests: tiny rice, maize, granary weevils, and tiny grain, saw-soothed, drug-store, flour beetles
    • Lepidoptera is next: Angoumois, Indian meal, and Med. flour moths
  • Dried fruit, beans, peas, peanuts, nuts, spices, snuff, etc.
  • Some are not so dry; fresh fruits, vegetables, potatoes, etc.

Fabrics and Paper

  • Cotton, wool, feathers, leather; carpet, clothes, furnishings
    • The keratin eaters: Beetles and moths again
  • Paper, books, documents, wallpaper, felt, etc.
    • Thysanura, Blattodea, and Isoptera

Wood Products

  • Lumber in storage or in buildings, structures
  • Isoptera: the big one (subterranean and friends)
  • Coleoptera are next in line
    • Powderpost bettles, old house borers, deathwatches
  • Hymenoptera are also carpenters: bees and ants

Household and Other Building Guests

  • Ideal environment for many pests; food, water, warm, humid
  • Pest control operator’s top ten
    • Cockroaches are number one
    • Next are termites, fleas, and ants
    • Others; pantry pests, carpet/clothes pests, wasps
  • Uniquely urban: Blattodea
    • Have adopted us with all their filthy habits
    • Can’t survive outside
  • German cockroach
    • Small, pale brown, 2 bars on prothorax, carries ootheca
    • Prefers kitchen, bathroom, but will live outside
  • Smoky Brown Cockroach (relatively new)
    • Large, shiny black-dark brown
    • Throughout house, likes tree holes, cold hardy
  • Home-grown American Cockroach
    • Large, red-brown color
    • Prefers the kitchen, likes hotels, industrial buildings
    • Some others; watch for the Asian version

Africanized Honeybees

  • Africanized honeybees are a potential new urban problem
    • Another innocent introduction from Brazil
    • Enter politics and the birth of the “killer bees”
    • Enter the press and Hollywood
    • The movement toward Texas and the U. S.