Rats that infest human structures create a nuisance due to noise, destructive eating and nesting habits, and a potential health threat as the carriers of disease.

Identifying a Rat
Rats are covered with hair and have long bodies, short legs, and a hairless tail. Their front feet have four toes, while their hind ones have five. A rat’s teeth are comprised of molars and chisel-like incisors, with a gap of space due to an absence of canine teeth. The largest common rat in Australia is the sewer rat, which is usually between seven and nine and a half inches long.

The Damage Rats Can Cause in your property
Approximately 20% of the world’s food supply is lost to rat consumption or contamination. For example, the cotton rat is an agricultural pest that causes damage to crops and invades structures storing plant material.

Rats also pose a great threat as the carriers and spreaders of disease. Depending on the species, a rat may carry the Black Creek Canal Virus, infectious jaundice, rat-bite fever, and salmonellosis.

Rats’ Life Cycle
Rats are generally considered to be highly prolific breeders. Depending on the species, a rat can reach sexual maturity at as early as six weeks old.

Female rats gestate their litters internally, giving birth to live young who are then nourished with milk. Although born hairless and blind, young rats are generally independent within one month.

A rat will rarely live beyond one year in the wild.

Rats’ Habits
The majority of rats are nocturnal and active year-round. They are generally shy creatures, usually with poor vision. Depending on the species, nests can be found both in upper parts of structures and in the ground.

Some rats, such as the black rat, are excellent runners, jumpers, and are even able to swim.

There are over 500 species of spiders living in Australia and over 35,000 known worldwide. Spiders are not insects but are arthropods of the class Arachnida.

Identifying a Spider
Spiders have two body regions, the head and the abdomen. This arthropod lacks antennae and has four pairs of slender legs. Male spiders are generally smaller than the females, though the exact sizes vary depending on the species. For example, an American house spider is about 3/16″ long, while a female tarantula is about 3″.

The Damage Spiders Can Cause
Most spiders will not bite unless provoked by handling or other contact. In many cases, bites occur when a person inadvertently comes in contact with a wandering male spider or a spider habit. Many spider species cannot pierce human skin with their fangs, and those that can generally leave the area in a state of minor irritation and swelling.

Two spiders that should be avoided the Sydney funnel-web (Atrax Robustus) and the Redback (Latrodectus Hasselti) because their bites can be painful for some days.

Are those two to be worried about? Since 1956 nobody died from a Redback bite and since 1980 nobody from a Sydney Funnel-web bite, mainly because of the development of antivenom.

White-tailed Spider bites have been controversially implicated in causing severe skin ulceration in humans. The white-tailed spider has a dark reddish to grey, cigar-shaped body and dark orange-brown banded legs. The grey dorsal abdomen bears two pairs of faint white spots (less distinct in adults) with a white spot at the tip; the male has a hard, narrow plate or scute on the front of the abdomen.

Spiders’ Life Cycle
After mating, a female spider will deposit eggs in a silken sac. Depending on the species, one sac can carry 20 eggs or several hundred. In general, those species that tend their eggs will produce fewer per egg sac, while those that abandon the sacs will produce larger numbers.

It is extremely rare for a female spider, including the black widow, to eat the male after mating.

Many spiders live only 1-2 seasons, but some species can live for as long as 20 years.

Spiders’ Habits
Most spiders are nocturnal and shy of human activity.

All spiders are predators and the primary food source is insects and other arthropods. After capturing their prey, the spider will kill or paralyse it with venom. When food is scarce, a spider can survive several weeks or months depending on the species.

Redback Spider	Garden Orb Spider	Funnel Web Spider
Huntsman Spider	Male Cupboard Spider	White Tip Spider

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Subterranean termites are commonly known as white ants. However, they are distinctly different from ants in their lifestyle and appearance.

In Nature, termites have an important role in recycling rotten timber in the forest and returning nutrients to the soil. When they get into our homes they are then declared pests and the damage they can cause to a home is substantial.

Identifying a Termite
Termites have pale brown to white bodies with a darker head and have no waist between the thorax and abdomen. The antennae have bead-like segments. The non-reproductive forms never develop wings, are blind, and have thin skin that makes them vulnerable to drying out. Reproductive forms have two pairs of equal-sized wings, one pair of compound eyes and thicker skin that protects them better from drying out when exposed.

The Damage Termites Can Cause
Many people fail to realise, until it’s too late, the extensive amount of damage that termites cause to modern homes. Since they remain concealed in the wood and enter your home through underground leads, it is often not until the damage is extensive and timbers collapse, that you realise you have a problem.

The workers are the ones who do all the damage. They are wingless, blind and sterile and are responsible for foraging for food, constructing tunnels, building the nest and feeding the other members of the colony. They feed on wood and other cellulose materials but have a preference for some timbers over others. As they feed they may hollow out timbers and often move from one area to another by constructing small tunnels made from a mud-like combination of faeces and saliva over non-susceptible materials.

They make these tunnels to protect themselves from predators and from the heat, light and lack of humidity in the outside environment. The soldiers responsible for the protection of the nest and in some species have a pair of mandibles on their head to attack predators. Termites can travel long distances to find food. The nest maybe fifty meters away from where the workers are foraging.

They can work their way into a house from under the floor, up the wall cavity, alongside plumbing penetrations or through construction joints in the concrete.

Termites Life Cycle
Termites undergo an incomplete metamorphosis, with three developmental stages:

»Egg
»Nymph
»Adult

The eggs hatch into nymphs that are fed by the workers, and these nymphs then moult several times, differentiating into worker, soldier or reproductive forms. Development into adult forms takes several months, depending on the food, temperature and the size of the colony. Hormones are thought to control the numbers of each caste, with imbalances corrected by nymphs developing into whichever form is needed at the time

The reproductives when sexually mature are winged. In the warmer, more humid months, they swarm and can often be seen in the early evening, flying out of bushland to colonise new areas, sometimes your home. The Queen lays eggs and once the nest is established, does nothing else. The Queen of a large, mature colony can lay up to 2000 eggs per day. These eggs develop into workers, soldiers and reproductives.

The workers are the ones who do all the damage. They are wingless, blind and sterile and are responsible for foraging for food, constructing tunnels, building the nest and feeding the other members of the colony. They feed on wood and other cellulose materials but have a preference for some timbers over others. As they feed they may hollow out timbers and often move from one area to another by constructing small tunnels made from a mud-like combination of faeces and saliva over non-susceptible materials

Termites Habits
Not all termites feed on wood, most feed on grass or other matter, and all are not pests to buildings. Those that do feed on wood will get their cellulose, sugar and starches from the sapwood of trees and timber constructions such as human buildings.

The queen can lay several thousand eggs in a day and the king is only slightly larger than the rest of the colony and will continue to mate with the queen for life. Nests are built in the soil because they are very dependent on the soil for their moisture.

Termites build their tunnels because they are susceptible to the environment on the outside. They usually work their way above ground to reach the cellulose, this is broken down into starch with the help of protozoans in the termites gut.

Nests are formed either in trees, in soil mounds or underground. There are 5 main nest types and many species will build more than one type of nest:

»Ground mounds
»Tree nests (outside tree, connected to the internal cavity)
»Pole nests (on human structures such as fence posts and telegraph poles)
»Subterranean nests (underground, in soil, stumps and tree bases)
»Tree wood (inside the tree)

Coptotermes Acinaciformes	Heterotermes SPP
Nasutitermes	Shedorhinotermes
Mastotermes

Wasps are a diverse group of insects. In Australia alone there are over 12,000 species, ranging from the tiny diapriid wasps, which are barely visible to the naked eye, to the spider and cicada-killer wasps, capable of taking large prey. Most wasps have carnivorous larvae that feed on other insects and spiders. The adults provide food for them by capturing prey or by laying the egg on or near the food source, which might be an egg, larva or pupa of another insect.

Identifying a Wasp
Depending on the species, wasps range between less than ½ an inch to more than 1 ½ inches in length. Wasps have both hind and front wings, with the hind wings being noticeably smaller than the front ones. Additionally, a wasp’s antennae are shorter than its body and have no noticeable scales on its surface. The European Wasp is easily identified by its lemon-yellow banding against a black body. In addition, the wasp does not look hairy.

The Damage Wasps Can Cause
The type of destruction that wasps cause is generally linked to their nesting habits or the hosts used for their larvae. Paper wasps will build their nests hanging from any protected surface such as a tree or porch. When these nests are in close proximity to a home, it is possible for them to be disturbed and people nearby to be stung. Although causing minimal destruction, the spider wasp does have a very painful sting making it a danger for people.

Wasps’ Life Cycle
Depending on the species, a wasp will either build a nest for its eggs or seek a host. Most species of wasps are solitary, laying their eggs, providing a food source for the larvae, and leaving without return.

Wasps’ Habits
In terms of nest builders, the mason wasp will create one nest for one egg, filling it with paralysed caterpillars or beetle larvae before sealing the nest.

Also a nest builder, the paper wasps are semi-social insects. These wasps exist in small colonies with queens and males. The founding queen will generally be the only one to lay eggs, but the others will retain their reproductive abilities and replace the founding queen, should it die.

Wasps whose larvae are housed in hosts include the digger and the spider ants. These wasps first sting the host to paralyse it and then attach their eggs, building a protective layer of cells around both the eggs and the host. The larvae will then feed on the paralysed host until reaching adulthood.

The wood wasp lays eggs in batches of 1-7 after inserting its ovipositor into wood. The wasp also inserts a fungus which grows quickly in the wood and provides a food source for the larvae as they burrow. A single wood wasp can lay 300-500 eggs each year, over a 10 day period.