#insect damage

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I don't know which creatures nibbled this datura leaf, but I know the assassin bug was not one of them. It is a small but mighty hunter.

Cochise County, Arizona, October 2024.

[houghtonlib]

Frass: debris or excrement produced by insects.

This manuscript is part of the José Agusto Escoto collection of Cuban history and literature. The 1574 manuscript in a later binding had extensive beetle damage ​from its previous life in the Caribbean when it arrived at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. There were such copious frass deposits that large sections of the 119 pages were stuck together, so much so that the text could not be read. Karen Walter, senior paper conservation technician, had a lot of work ahead of her.

The manuscript needed to be stabilized for digitization by disbinding, separating the fragile pages, re-attaching the fragments with media, and rehousing in Mylar sleeves.

It was the “separating” part of this task that worried Karen until, during disbinding, she realized that the frass was very brittle. She did a test using a Teflon tool to apply pressure through the paper on top of a small area of frass and was surprised when it crumbled away allowing her to slide a microspatula further between the two pages until it hit the next deposit. In the worst cases, this step was repeated dozens of times.

As a result, the pages were successfully separated with minimal loss of media revealing text which had been inaccessible for many years. And as a bonus, it turned out that crushing desiccated bug poop for days was a lot of fun!

[briery]

Beetle Gallery The gallery is carved into the tree’s phloem, or inner bark, by female beetles and their larvae. Some species of beetles carve a specific pattern, while others carve random grooves. The galleries are often beautiful but beetle attacks are deadly.

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Moonflowers, worlds within worlds.  Cochise County, Arizona, September 2022.