Diversity and Prevalence of Nuisance Arthropods Detected by Sticky Traps in Apartments in New Jersey
Homes can offer the perfect environment for a wide range of nuisance arthropods such as flies, beetles, spiders and ants. They often find their way into our structures in search of resources, and if conditions are right, these problem pests can start reproducing in no time. The key to controlling most nuisance arthropods is through early detection, stopping these tiny invaders in the first weeks of an introduction before they have the chance to multiply. However, this is often easier said than done because pest management professionals can’t be present in every client’s home standing guard around the clock waiting for pests to enter.
One option for early detection is with the use of monitoring devices such as sticky traps. Sticky traps have been used for decades to offer the ability to surveil pest activity long after PMPs have left an account. A recent study published by a group of researchers at Rutgers University in March of 2023 offered some amazing insight into just how effective these tacky tools can be at monitoring pest activity. While using sticky cards to evaluate cockroach activity in low-income apartments in New Jersey, the researchers also counted and reported the total number of nuisance arthropods recovered on these sticky traps. In this study, they defined nuisance arthropods as any arthropods other than cockroaches and bedbugs.
For this study, researchers placed sticky traps in 1,581 low-income apartments located in four different cities in New Jersey from 2018-2019. Four sticky traps were placed in each unit, 3 in the kitchen and 1 in the bathroom, and then left for 2 weeks. And, what they found was pretty amazing.
Overall, nuisance arthropods were found on sticky cards from 42% (or 664) of apartments surveyed. In terms of abundance, flies were captured most at 36%, with beetles at 23%, and spiders and ants coming in 3rd through 4th place. When they broke down each pest group further, they found that fungus gnats accounted for nearly half of all flies captured at 42%, and 82% of all the beetles captured were stored product beetles.
The researchers even conducted follow-up surveys on over 1,000 residences to get an idea of how often residences visually detected pest activity at these residences, and amazingly enough only 13% of those interviewed reported sightings. And those that reported sightings reported seeing flies most frequently at 58% compared to beetles at only 4%. Even though beetles were recovered in nearly a quarter of the homes surveyed!
Overall, this study really underscored three key points: 1) homes can offer the perfect environment for pests, and these pests can easily go undetected, 2) client reports may not be a reliable source of actual pest activity, and 3) sticky cards can serve as an incredibly important surveillance tool offering PMP’s the ability to more accurately monitor pest activity allowing for early detection and potentially improved control of a number of nuisance arthropod pests.
Article by Mike Bentley, PhD, BCE
References
Changlu Wang, Salehe Abbar, Xiaodan Pan, Sabita Ranabhat, Richard Cooper, Diversity and prevalence of nuisance arthropods detected by sticky traps in apartments in New Jersey, Journal of Economic Entomology, Volume 116, Issue 4, August 2023, Pages 1317–1320, https://doi.org/10.1093/jee/toad114
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