Fighting silverfish in a hoarder’s home

So much had been accumulated in the home for more than a decade that it would be nearly impossible to gain control over pests with chemical treatment in its hoarded state. PHOTO: NATASHA WRIGHT

Pests are proficient at taking advantage of us, even when we think we’re being clean and tidy. In a hoarder’s home, the necessities of their “triangle of life” — food, water and shelter — are seemingly infinite. What lurks in those cluttered and undisturbed places? You have some guesses as to the pests that might inhabit a home of endless resources, as did I. I was surprised, but also not surprised, to find out for myself.

I recently had the opportunity to clean up a severely cluttered house. My first time there, I could barely open the front door to a 30-degree angle. The pathways through the home were narrow and consisted of trash compressed down to about 8 inches from the floor. Although there were pest issues, I was there to clean, not control. Still, pest control inevitably happened. In its state, this home was not a candidate for typical pest control efforts; no amount of chemical control could penetrate the dense and interwoven layers of debris.

The homeowner understood her hoarding was a problem, and she was willing to accept help. She let her 17-year-old son and me completely gut the house and throw away whatever we wanted — which was just about everything. We pulled out more than three tons of dilapidated furniture, color-faded clothing, petrified food, and garbage that was so far decayed I couldn’t even begin to guess what it might have been before.

So much had been accumulated in the home for more than a decade that it would be nearly impossible to gain control over pests with chemical treatment in its hoarded state. PHOTO: NATASHA WRIGHT

A haven for pests

This was a home with a decade’s worth of debris buildup and uninhibited pest activity:

• The couch had a palpable aura of ammonia from the deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) that were nesting in its cushions.
• The refrigerator, which was last opened six years prior, had a crusty layer of phorid flies (Phoridae) at the bottom.
• Cellar spiders (Pholcus spp.) took up residence in every single corner and in every single area slightly resembling a corner.
• Odorous house ants (Tapinoma sessile, or OHA) collected any exposed food and swarmed around the remains of other fallen pests.

The most remarkable pest of all, though, was what skittered among the vast heaps of outdated mail, snack wrappers, mismatched socks, disintegrating paper, used dental flossers, encrusted coins and cheap pens sporting the names of local businesses that no longer existed: the common silverfish (Lepisma saccharina).

The hardwood floor was hardly visible, lost to the ages under layers of rubbish. The browning waste was analogous to leaf litter decomposing on the forest floor. It was here in this moist microclimate that silverfish thrived and overpopulated all other pests in this home. Picking up a mere handful of floor-level debris would send hundreds of shiny, wriggling bodies into a frenzy of motion. Never have I seen so many silverfish in one place.

A bedroom in the house shown in its hoarded state. PHOTO: NATASHA WRIGHT

Dismantling Pest Valhalla

Over the course of roughly 10 days, her son and I discarded roughly 10 years’ worth of garbage. Silverfish kept retreating from the clean areas to the cluttered areas, until there were no more filthy places to hide. Very rarely, in pest control, do we get to see what cultural control can do all by itself. While I employed a bit of mechanical control for the deer mouse stragglers, very little chemical control was needed to take back ownership of this home from the pests.

In the end, the last holdouts of the pest population were cellar spiders and OHA. The silverfish were hit hardest by the loss of their damp and cellulose-rich habitat. OHA were brutal toward the end of the cleaning, but they succumbed after 60 grams of gel bait. This was the only chemical control that was necessary throughout the entire home.

I later pondered on the overabundance of silverfish and the underabundance of German cockroaches (Blattella germanica). My first thought was that the homeowner didn’t travel much, and she refused the company of her family and friends. The possibility existed that a cockroach may never have been introduced.

My second thought came much later, when I learned that the home is not consistently heated during the winter. Rather, heat is limited to a space heater and an electric blanket. I performed most of the cleaning during the late summer and fall, when heat was not necessary. Even if German cockroaches were present at some point in time, they would have struggled to survive during the colder months.

Would I have noticed any dead German cockroaches among the filth? Would the ants, silverfish, and carpet beetles have consumed their remains? It’s hard to know for sure, but there is one thing for certain: In this home, with its unique conditions and widely fluctuating temperatures, the common silverfish reigned.

A bedroom in the house shown in its cleaning state. PHOTO: NATASHA WRIGHT

A bedroom in the house shown in its cleaned-out state. Amazingly, no cockroaches! PHOTO: NATASHA WRIGHT