Sitting in his work truck in Heber, Thomas Harris spent his lunch break eating a gas station hot dog. He doesn’t have a lot of time to decompress during the busy summer months.
“You really do age every summer,” he said. “I like to count them like dog years. So I'm around 70.”
Harris has worked in pest control for the last 11 years and started his own company called Uinta Pest Solutions four years ago. Since then, business has boomed. Part of that is due to Utah’s population growth. Another factor is the increased prevalence of urban pests throughout the state.
He pointed to bed bugs in Park City as an example.
“With more traveling coming to Utah, with more homes, more Airbnbs, more hotels popping up in Park City,” he explained. “We're seeing as many bed bug calls to Park City as other parts of the valley that were more associated with bed bugs and bugs in general.”
Bed bugs travel, Harris said. So people are likely bringing the nuisance with them. But bed bugs aren’t the only problem he sees growing.
While new home construction is necessary to ease the housing crisis and infrastructure updates are needed, they exacerbate the bug problem. Harris said it disrupts the ecosystems that live in the sewer pipes or in the ground that developers dig into.
“When you're doing that much construction to sewers and pipes and roads, and you start digging, bugs just spread like wildfire.”
The most noticeable public nuisance pest is cockroaches. They show up during the summer, especially in downtown Salt Lake City.
Harris said he’s getting even more calls than normal. That’s because the Oriental cockroach, a common breed found in Utah, lives in sewer systems. Additionally, with more high rises taking over the city, he said it adds more people, more bathrooms and more bodily fluids. All of that attracts roaches.
“When you build, you're destroying where they [cockroaches] are living, and now they're going to find new places,” Harris said. “And some people don't like that. And I love that people don't like roaches around their house because it creates a job for me.”
Marion Murray, an integrated pest management specialist at Utah State University, has studied pests for 20 years. She primarily looks at the evolution of agricultural and ornamental pests. Murray has noticed some pests are migrating north, living longer and able to produce more offspring because Utah’s climate is warming. As a result, it’s wreaking havoc on agricultural producers and natural environments.
Murray specifically cited the codling moth. The little worm is commonly found in apples and typically takes six and a half weeks to fully develop. That’s not the case anymore.
“Now it's about three and a half weeks,” she said. “It’s happening more quickly because it's been so much warmer.”
Essentially, the codling moth has an extra life cycle than it used to, and it means fruit farmers have significantly more harmful insects to deal with in the same amount of time. The insects can have a devastating impact on a harvest if they aren’t killed.
“Without good control, they could lose up to 10% of their crop, which is a big chunk of money,” she said.
Utah is also welcoming new pests.
The elm seed bug has made a drastic appearance in Utah over the last few years. The bug, a cousin of the infamous box elder bug, gets in window seals and hangs out. While they don’t carry any diseases or bite, they’re unappealing and annoying.
“I've never seen one. I only see 20 or 30 in every window,” Harris said.
The sycamore scale is also migrating further north, Murray said. The microscopic bug was originally found in southern California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico and causes leaf and bark damage on trees. It was discovered in St. George in 2009. It stayed to the south, where temperatures are often much warmer, until 2012, when it was spotted in northern Utah. Murray said it’s now made its way to Ogden.
“What it tells me is that our winters, especially, are warming up,” she said.
The warming temperatures also mean bug season starts sooner. While pest control is a year-round business, Harris said the busy season depends on the winter. When Utah received record-breaking snowfall two years ago, the season started late.
That is not the case this year. Calls ramped up in January because there were a few times temperatures hit above 60 degrees. Harris said he made an extra $30,000 that month, about a 50% increase, and business hasn’t slowed since.
And like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, Murray anticipates that more pests that never used to be able to survive in Utah will begin to. That’ll lead to more outbreaks, which have already happened in St. George when the green stink bug took over in the summer of 2019.
“It's concerning because I don't know that we can stop it,” Murray said.
