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Spring brings longer days, warmer temperatures and the comforting return of plants and songbirds—but it also kicks off the active season for many tiny arthropods that suddenly become visible indoors. If you’ve noticed minute red, brown, or translucent specks crawling along window sills, walls, houseplants, bedding or your pets, you’re not alone. These aren’t dust…

People often use the terms “house mites” and “dust mites” interchangeably, but they are not synonymous. “Dust mites” refers specifically to a few species of microscopic arachnids (most commonly Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus and D. farinae) that thrive on the microscopic flakes of human skin found in bedding, upholstered furniture, and carpets. “House mites” is a broader,…

Mites are tiny relatives of spiders that live almost everywhere — in homes, on people and pets, and in plants and stored foods. Because many species are microscopic, infestations often begin quietly and go unnoticed until symptoms become obvious. Yet early detection matters: left unchecked, mites can cause persistent itching and skin rashes, trigger or…

The future of pest control for Pacific Northwest homeowners will be shaped by forces both local and global: a temperate, wet climate that favors many pest species; growing urbanization and changing land use that bring humans and wildlife into closer contact; and a warming climate that alters pest ranges and life cycles. For residents of…

Pest outbreaks—whether in row crops, orchards, forests, or stored grain—cause major economic losses, threaten food security, and disrupt ecosystems. Traditional monitoring methods (field scouting, trap inspection, and manual surveys) are labor-intensive, slow, and often reactive: farmers and land managers spot trouble only after populations have grown. That gap is where a new generation of technologies,…

Pesticide, herbicide and drug resistance is not a mystery so much as an inevitable outcome of evolutionary pressure: when a pest population—whether an insect, weed, fungus, bacterium or parasite—is repeatedly exposed to the same control measure, individuals that by chance carry genetic variations allowing them to survive will reproduce and pass those traits on. Over…

Hidden infestations are one of the most costly and frustrating problems property owners and managers face. Pests such as termites, rodents, bed bugs, and even wasp or bee colonies can lurk behind walls, inside insulation, under floors, and in roof voids for months or years before visible signs — hollowed wood, droppings, or structural damage…

Pheromone-based pest control is an approach that uses the natural chemical signals insects use to communicate — called pheromones — to manipulate pest behavior rather than to poison them. Although pheromones themselves are chemical compounds, the techniques that use them are fundamentally different from conventional insecticide spraying: they rely on tiny doses of species-specific odor…

Pest detection and control have always been central to public health, agriculture and property protection, and modern approaches increasingly combine biology with optics and electronics. Ultraviolet (UV) light — particularly long-wave UV-A (black light) and short-wave germicidal UV-C — has emerged as a versatile tool in this shift. Rather than replacing conventional chemical and mechanical…

Advances in genetics and biotechnology are creating new tools to control populations of insect, rodent, and other pest species that damage crops or transmit human and animal diseases. Traditional approaches—chemical pesticides, traps, and the sterile insect technique (in which mass-reared males are sterilized and released to reduce reproduction)—remain important, but a wave of genetic methods…