Silverfish

Morag Wehrle <morag.wehrle [at] pc__gc__ca> writes

>Our entire office building, which is also home to our library and
>archives, is currently having problems with silverfish.

I encountered similar problems in Australia. The city council in
Geelong made many attempts to eradicate that pest from their office
building containing an archive and a library, but the silverfish was
much smarter than the exterminators and moved ahead of them.

What mattered was the way they went about spraying. If the
exterminator sprayed from the top of the building down, one floor at
a time, silverfish moved down ahead of them, until they reached the
ground and basement floors. The silverfish then moved next door and
returned when the effectiveness of the residual spray decreased, and
rapidly re-populated the building. The owners instead started in the
basement and moved up, trapping the silverfish at the top of the
building and destroyed them.

I tried this procedure with another badly infested archive, and
silverfish left the building through the external masonry (between
mortar and bricks and cracks in concrete), then down the outside and
next door again. It was a sea of silverfish moving down the outside.
The owner of the building next door was appalled to see a swarm of
silverfish and cockroaches coming across the pavement into his
building.

So if you have the building sprayed and not the archive and library,
then it is likely that many silverfish will go there. I would
recommend that you have the whole building sprayed including
external areas around the ground floor to intercept escaping
silverfish, and set up a chemical barrier to prevent them moving
back in.

Ian Fulton
Senior Conservator
Photographs, Sound and Film
Australian War Memorial
+61 2 6243 4426
Fax: +61 2 6241 7998


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 19:54
                    Distributed: Friday, May 5, 2006
                       Message Id: cdl-19-54-003
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