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Microbial control of urban pests – cockroaches, ants and termites

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Abstract

Urban pests, represented in this chapter by cockroaches, ants and termites, present a unique challenge for microbial control. They are all known to detect and avoid both chemical and microbial pesticides, they have few natural enemies to integrate with microbial pesticides, the relatively constant environment is often inhibitory to infection by fungi, and few naturally occurring pathogens have been identified to develop. Add to this the expectation of householders to have quick, long-term control the pest and the difficulty of obtaining funding for research on the use of pathogens for urban pest control (Oi and Hinkle, 1997), and it becomes obvious why this is an underresearched area.

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Milner, R.J., Pereira, R.M. (2007). Microbial control of urban pests – cockroaches, ants and termites. In: Lacey, L.A., Kaya, H.K. (eds) Field Manual of Techniques in Invertebrate Pathology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5933-9_34

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