Silverfish Extermination
Silverfish Extermination? Imagine if you were in an epic battle with an invading enemy that has been on the earth 100 million years longer than the dinosaurs. Imagine this nearly unstoppable invader was extremely adaptable, could live on the crudest kind of foods, and was immune to dozens of varieties of poisons.
Many people today are embroiled right now with that very enemy, and it’s the amazing silverfish. At first, the name “silverfish” sound like something pretty, like a beautiful, sparking fish. But a silverfish is a common crawling insect, and millions of homes serve as unwilling hosts to these persistent pests, which are extremely difficult to get rid of.
Unlike other household pests, such as cockroaches, silverfish can live on either food, or non-food substances. What makes silverfish tough is that they can eat things like paper, glue, cardboard, books, or anything with starch in it, including pasta, potatoes, sawdust, wallpaper and more. Thus, keeping an extremely clean kitchen is not enough to starve out silverfish and accomplish silverfish extermination.
You also need to make sure you don’t have old newspaper lying around or cardboard boxes, say, in closets, or other areas. Silverfish love to eat this kind of stuff. One of the best silverfish extermination strategies is to seek out where they seem to be thriving the most, find where they are keeping their eggs — and then destroy the eggs.
Yes, there are some insecticides designed to poison and kill silverfish, but you’ll have limited success with a poisoning approach if you don’t also find the eggs and get rid of them. When you poison the adults, the hatchlings will emerge in 19 to 43 days, and you’ll have more silverfish! Still, check with your local hardware or department store and ask for substances designed to knock off silverfish.
Silverfish have amazingly long life spans. Some have been noted to live up to eight years in captivity. They also can get into just about any area of your house because they are expert jumpers. They have the ability to spring some two feet into the air. You ultimate success in silverfish extermination is often determined by how well you clean your house and remove those things that make silverfish happy — again, substances containing starch, such as carpet glue, rugs, books, newspapers, cardboard, old wallpaper, bits of starchy foods, and so forth.
If you really want to pinpoint where silverfish are living, try setting some bait. Make a paste from flour and water and spread it on some small squares of cardboard, or maybe index cards. Set them in places where you think silverfish are sighted most in your home. The cards that show the most nibbling indicate a silverfish colony somewhere nearby. With this knowledge, you can better search and destroy.
By the way, why are these tenacious pests called silverfish? You’ll know when you see them. They resemble tiny silver fish. They’re about a ½-inch long as adults. Silverfish are expert survivors. As we said, scientists know they go back at least 400 million years because they have been found in fossils. But don’t get discouraged. You can banish the tenacious silverfish from your home. Silverfish extermination is possible. It takes effort, a strategy and a determination to destroy their habitat, which also means you’ll have a more neat and tidy house.
