 Elsa, go ahead whenever you're ready. OK, thank you, Mike. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation, and we are so glad that you're joining us today. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Times who are producing this event today. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the Connecting to Collections bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And we have links to those resources filed under the topics menu on the site, which is again at ConnectingToCollections.org. We will also be filing that recording of today's webinar there if you want to share it with colleagues in the future. About twice a month, the Connecting to Collections online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource, and we host a webinar related to it. The resources that we posted for today's webinar can be accessed by clicking this photo on our web page, not in this presentation, or by going directly to the web page at ConnectingToCollections.org. So today, we want to welcome Barbara Cumberland, who is a conservator at the Conservator of Museum and Conservation Services at the Harper's Ferry Center at the National Park Service, and Carol DeSalvo, Integrated Pest Management Coordinator at the National Park Service. And I want to thank them for taking the time to answer your questions today. Barbara and Carol, would you like to say a few words? Sure, this is Carol. Thanks, Elsa. I'll start off. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks, Elsa and Mike, for having us. This is a real treat for me to be on the phone doing this because I love this type of interaction, and it's nice to hear what the field's working on. I've been with the National Park Service for, oh gosh, almost 30 years now, and in the Integrated Pest Management Program. And our main mission for this program is to reduce risks from pests and pest management-related strategies. So my job involves all different types of pest issues that come up through the phone or through technical assistance requests from all different types of areas, from bed bugs to weeds to skunks, all types of different things, and of course, the museum test world. We have to manage things in accordance with federal law and policy, and we try to come up with the lowest risk and most effective management strategy and really try to find the actual problem that's causing the pest issue rather than just treat the symptoms. I have always enjoyed working with the museum folks because they seem to right away grasp this concept because they know if something gets damaged, that's it. The damage is there. You can't go replace it. It's a one-of-a-kind type item usually. And through this work, I've met Barbara Cumberland, and she has become the museum pest expert. I deal with all different types of stuff, but Barbara, we go to her for our specific issues. And the one thing we do share in common is we both enjoy these little critters and things that are affecting our items. And we'll go through this step process in a little while, but we both do appreciate the little lies of these critters that are in our museum collections. So Barbara? Hi, how are you? Yeah, I have been working for the National Park Service at Harper's Ferry Center in the Museum Conservation Labs for Museum Conservation Services since 1988. And what we do here in my job in general is we have conservators that do conservation treatments on museum objects from national parks from all over the country. The majority of them are from things going on exhibit in the national parks, either in a conventional museum exhibit or a historic furnished building or that kind of thing. And one of the big preservation issues is damage from museum pests. It's one of the agents of deterioration that we talk about. And I've just noticed that a lot of the things that we do need to do hands-on conservation treatments on, especially our textile conservator, an awful lot of time and effort goes into repairing damage from things like clothes moths and carpet beetles on flags and woolen uniforms and different things like that. And we also see it with our furniture conservators working on things with wood boring beetle holes in them. So sometimes things come into the conservation labs with these problems or with active infestations. And we have to do something about it and prevent them, the pests from going on other objects. And otherwise, I've kind of become the integrated pest manager coordinator for our conservation labs building. And that involves doing pest monitoring and a lot of things that we'll be talking about today. And it's just become a real interest of mine. And I've had the opportunity to actually travel to different national parks and help them with integrated pest management plans for their museums and seen such a wide variety of problems that it's just really interesting to try to come up with safe management solutions to these kind of issues. We'll be talking a little bit about that today. So briefly, that's my background. I'm an objects conservator. And I work on a variety of materials, anything from metal to leather, just fiber, and all different kind of things. So anyway, I'll be showing you some pictures of things, too. So thanks. Thanks. Thanks, Carol. I am Barbara. I know this is going to be a very interesting conversation. And some of those pictures are really disturbing. Here we go. I will be pulling over a poll. It's actually not a poll. It's a general question for everyone to start us off. We'd like to know what your biggest pest problem is. Fill in that blank at the bottom there. Dirt doppers. What are dirt doppers? Mud doppers. Dirt doppers. I'm thinking that those are probably mud dopper wasps. OK. These in the wall. Interesting variety. OK. Thank you, Angela. Does all of this sound like what you would be expecting, Barbara? Yes, and more. Looks familiar. Those little flying black bugs. Yeah, those are bad. They're innocent and still proven guilty, however. You'll find that Carol will, at every opportunity, stick up for the bugs. And they're right to live out in nature. And I will say yes, but keep them out of our museums. Which links us to this webinar as to the conditions conducive to pests. You folks have quite a good list here. I would like a copy of this list. I will be saving it. I'll pull it off of the screen, but it will be saved in the background. We can pull it back up, and we can definitely copy and paste and keep it for later. All right, everybody, thank you so much for these responses. I'm going to pull this away. And I'm going to pull up now the conservagram that's the basis for our conversation today. It's been posted on the Connecting to Collections website. And it should be downloadable, too. As I pull this over, you'll see an icon in the left corner that has a disk. And you should be able to capture it there, if you like. Barbara or Carol, did one of you want to say something about this? That should be pulling up right now. Yes, this is one of the conservagrams put out by the National Park Service. And they are all available on the internet. And aside from this one, there are a number of others that do have to do with pest issues and pesticide issues, pesticides that have been used in museum collections before. So when you get into the National Park Service conservagram website, I think most of the conservagrams dealing with pests are in sections three and also section two, which has to do with curatorial safety. Anyway, this is a very nice conservagram that has some good color photos and a brief description of the kind of museum pests that a lot of you are likely to deal with. So it's a good introduction into identifying the damage from these kind of museum pests. I'll get a chance to read it. And I just posted the URL for the table of contents for your conservagram in the chat box. It's a really good resource. And you'll find a lot of, as I said, a lot of ones having to do with pesticides and pests in sections two and three. Section three is on agents of deterioration. OK, I could pull over the IPM authorities if you're ready for that. Sure, that sounds good. We'd like to show you our list of IPM authorities. And we put this together for our National Park Service managers, but many of these things, most of them apply to everybody. We, like most organizations, have to operate under certain authorities and rules and regulations. So this is a 100% complete list, but a pretty good list that we updated recently in this January. I guess it was on the different types of laws, regulations that we have to follow when we're managing any type of pest issues. And under the Federal Infecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the top one there is kind of the key law that established this whole integrated pest management effort. And it was also supported through the 1979 presidential memorandum through President Carter. And the whole IPM story started because after World War II, we had an awful lot of pesticides available, and they were used everywhere to manage pest issues, and they were very effective. But then we started seeing negative effects to people, our resources, and the environment. And that's when the breaks kind of came on, you know, a silent spring with Rachel Carson came out earlier and made everybody alert to what's going on. So this is just the list that everybody can kind of use as a guide as to why we use this integrated pest management approach. But the key reason we use it is, in fact, it works. And we'll talk a little bit about the IPM process in the next few minutes here. Thanks, Elsa. OK, oh, you're welcome. I'll pull over the 11-step process next. So the 11-step process that's coming up next is it's pretty much a decision-making process. It's common sense written down in 11 steps, essentially. We put this together with the Fish and Wildlife Service. And many other agencies use it if you look on any extension website from any community or state college. Everybody has some sort of a step process on IPM. We happen to have 11 steps, and that's what we're going to go over here. But we're not going to go over each and every one because it will take forever. And those of you who have been in our class on the National Park Service and know that we do this for a whole week. So Barbara and I thought we would focus on a couple of key points that have to do with this particular webinar. So the first step, which is really important, is you have to know your site management objective and figure out what your short and long-term priorities are. Because, for instance, if you have mice running through the museum, you have to get rid of the mice immediately, and maybe through snap trapping. And the long-term thing would be to figure out how to exclude them permanently. But there's times you have to take quick action and then plan for the future. The next steps is build consensus. Of course, you have to have everybody in place. You have to have everybody on board, or you're not going to get anywhere. You need to have consensus. Always document, section three, your actions. Number four is very important, and we are going to elaborate on that one, which is to know your resource. You are responsible for whatever type of museum situation you're in or artifacts. And you have to know that resource intimately. You must know everything about the site that you store it in. You must know how things come in and out. You have to know what type of material you have, and Barbara has some great slides on that. But you have to look at your building or your site as a living system. Because inside that building, even inside each little display case, there's its own little site ecology. How air flows, how heat and air come in and out, or cool air, what the material is made out of, what your little critter, or fungus, or whatever the pest is, what they need to survive. You have to know everything about them, where they like to hide, what they like to eat, who may be a predator on them, if they're a symptom, or if they're actually a cause of a problem. So we'll focus on number one, number four, and then the next one, number five, know your pest. And that's the one we're going to really focus on in this webinar. Our destination of pest is something that's interfering with your site management objective. So once you know what you're supposed to be responsible for, if it's interfering with that action, or that responsibility, it's considered a pest. Critters, or fungus, or whatever the pest is, could be a pest in one situation and not in another. Depends on all the site characteristics. So you're a pest here, but you may not be a pest there. But we must know that and remember that these little things that are called pests are doing what nature intended them to do. So the fact that they're affecting our items means we've given them a condition where they are happy and want to pursue their little biology that they have to employ. So it's our job to figure out how to make it non-conduces for them. So we'll look at what type of potential pest species we have, know their biology, and the conditions conducive to support the pest. Number six is very important monitoring, so you figure out if you're getting anywhere with your actions. And not just the pest population, we're also going to monitor environmental factors, excuse me, factors, and other things that are happening in that site. Number seven, establishing action threshold. Figure out at what point no additional damage can happen, or are you going to lose the resource? So you have to figure out how much you can tolerate or not. And often in the museum world, your action tolerance is, your threshold is zero because you have that one item that's unique. Action thresholds are different and different types of situations, such as like natural wild areas. Step eight, Barbara will touch on a couple of those things and I'll chime in as well, different management tools that are available. We try to pick out, review all the tools available and then pick out the best ones that are going to help to manage that situation. Sometimes physical strategies will be better, or cultural strategies, biological control agents possibly, or chemical testifies strategies. So there's different types of strategies available and we have to identify which would be the best complex of those and using them together is the integrated approach with all these other steps. Number nine is important, very important, you have to define who's going to do what. Because if you don't, people don't know who's taking care of what aspect of this pest management strategy. If you have someone taking care of the building, they've maintenance staff, they need to know where your snap traps are put. They need to know if you have a leak somewhere because that's creating moisture. You have to really involve the right people. And things need to be carried out in accordance with policy. Number 10, of course, you must evaluate how you're doing your results and modify the strategy if necessary to reach your goals and protect the resource. And number 11 is pretty much what we're doing today, education and outreach and continue the learning cycle. So it's great to see all the examples you guys gave because that helps us to see what else is happening in the field, what's new and different and we learn from each other. Okay, that's it, Elsa, thanks. Okay. We have one or two questions that have come in now. I wonder if we could address those before we went into the presentation. Here, I'll put this one from Peter Olson asking about if there's some sort of a poster that pictures typical pests. Are you aware of something like that that we could share and if? Yeah, yes, we are. There is a good poster with illustrations of many of the museum pests available from a company called Insects Limited, which is also on the internet and the poster can be ordered from InsectsLimited.com, I think it is. And I think we might have, there might be a link to that on this program. Okay, I'll find it and put it up, oh there. Yeah, that's the poster that comes to mind for me. Yeah, InsectsLimited has a lot of other great items for museum issues. I think we listed some of them in that reference. Okay, and then we have one more question here. Mike, is that okay if I put that one up? Here, here we go. From Eloise Warren, can you see that? It went away, but hi Eloise, it's Carol, how you doing? I see it. Hi, we are looking to learn more about possible treatments for webbing and case making clothes, moth and frustration in upholstered antique vehicles. Is there anything more effective and comprehensive than our current vacuuming and freezing, removing seats and mats to place in the freezer? And is there anything out there that could provide residual protection? I have an idea about that. I was recently doing an integrated pest management plant, museum integrated pest management plan for one of our parks that had that problem, except it wasn't the clothes moth, they had carpet beetles eating their upholstery in the antique vehicle. And I suggested, and I suggested if possible that they could roll it out of the garage into the sun on one of those hottest days of the year. And you know how, on the hottest days of the year, how the interior of the vehicle can get very, very hot inside. And heat is also a way of killing most insects if you can get the temperature inside the vehicle like over 120 degrees, which is common on these really, really hot days like we're getting in the east right now and in the Midwest too. You should, that might be a good thing to think about. I don't know if that's a possibility with your antique vehicles, but again, it's something to think about. You're vacuuming and freezing, just keep on vacuuming and do that and freezing that would kill the insects also. And you might also get a clothes moth pheromone lure and put it in, put a couple of those inside the vehicles that would hopefully attract any of the adults before they lay more eggs. That might be another thing. Carol, can you think of any? No, I think those are, that's what I would come up with. I think those are great, excellent ideas. And the idea of parking things in the sun is a good idea. It would get most of them out of the garage and it would get most of them, I think a lot of them would try to migrate where it's cooler in those little micro habitats that you still might have residual population. So it would definitely knock out the majority, though, for sure. Hopefully that might be a possibility where their vehicle could be moved out into the sun this time of year. We have a question about pheromone trap. Yes, there are pheromone lures available that rather than like a passive sticky trap, they would actively draw certain insects in, it's more or less a bait and it's species specific and pheromone traps are available for some of the museum pests, like I think both case making clothes moths, webbing clothes moths, several of the domestic species, like varied carpet beetle, black carpet beetle, drugoderma, which is like a cabinet beetle, I think drugstore beetle, which is a cellulose eating pest, and maybe, and I think cigarette beetle, which is also a cellulose eating pest, they could be used in like museum storage or in a museum exhibit, you'd wanna put it at a far distance from the doors and windows just so you wouldn't attract anything from outside and just kind of have it like in a museum storage room, maybe not right up against the objects, but just outside in the room. And yeah, but that's something that is used in museums. Okay, I see you're thinking about them for moths. So yeah, they do have the pheromones for webbing clothes moth and case making clothes moths, and they're also available from that company Insects Limited. They're just seem to be the major supplier of pheromone lures that I'm aware of. Yes, we might add that if you have these traps set up, don't rely on them 100% though, because you still need to do other methods to make sure you're not getting damage and monitoring and all that, but it is a great tool. Yeah, and they are basically intended as a monitoring trap, although they can provide some degree of control by attracting the insects into the trap so they're not alive anymore. I see that you're bringing up, are we going to another question or did you want to go to the slides that are coming up on the screen? Since we have another question up now, let's answer that one and then we have the slides and we can start going through the slides, but I just want to encourage the audience that if you have questions that occur to you as we're going through this to keep putting them in, we'll address some of them as we go through and some we will reserve for. Some we'll get back to. Yeah, yeah. But here we have another one about bed bugs. Could you address that one? Bed bugs, my favorite. I can email you stuff if you like, but they'll tell you right off the bat there's a great website. It's called bedbugcentral.com and it's one of the best ones we've found. We've had the proprietor of this site teach us in the National Park Service the best strategies for managing bed bugs. There are little traps called interceptor traps which are normally used on beds and essentially there's no chemical involved. They're just smooth surface cups and they go underneath your bed legs and the critters can't get up to the bed. The bed bug, there are some other bed bug traps that are very expensive where they actually give off carbon dioxide and you can attract bed bugs to it, but the whole thing with bed bugs is really education and it's pretty much a whole gigantic talk into itself but there are some traps out there. It's kind of a really big topic to get into. The good thing is that they do not transmit any disease. They're more of a biggy type thing and they have reemerged because of the resistance to current pesticides that we were using and in the past we did a lot of baseboard treatment for cockroaches and that also got the bed bugs but we don't do that anymore due to health issues so the bed bugs have reemerged and the heat treatment works great. There are portable ovens you can purchase which are also on that website. I have a friend whose every time his son comes home from college he dumps everything from the kid on the back porch into his oven, plugs it in outside, it's a foldable oven. He eats everything the kid owns before he is allowed back in the house because they've had bed bugs before in the dorm. I'd be glad to, I don't know, send information if you wanna send us an email but it's kind of a really big topic to get into now. Okay, thanks. Should we start going through the presentation? Yes, let's do that. Okay, I'll start flipping through these pictures up on your screen. The first title page happens to show a rug from one of our presidential homes that has been plagued with case-making clothes moths and the person is pointing to the actual larval case that the moth larva leave behind and on the right of the screen you can see where the carpet has been damaged and it's just a big problem because it's such a large, a very, very large carpet that they have and so it's difficult to find a freezer to freeze it and they've vacuumed and vacuumed anyway, they've used freezing and vacuuming as a strategy on this particular item and I just wanna flip through a couple of pictures showing some examples of the kind of things we're trying to avoid in museums and on the bottom there's damage by a domested beetle larva to the base of a horn of a sheep and it's actually eaten into the horn itself which is the keratin material that the carpet beetles and the hide beetles like to eat. Above that is something that has come into our conservation lab, a chair that they found that there was a dead mouse inside of it and had decomposed and had been nesting inside the chair and that in turn attracted other insect pests. It attracted more of these domestic beetles which I'll be talking about their protein eating pests and to the right there's a picture of a book where an insect has tunneled through all of the pages and eaten them out and at first I thought it had been done by a drugstore beetle that I've heard that they burrow through books but then since then I've seen that that kind of pattern of damage is pretty typical of termites that termites can come up from the ground and into a box that's sitting on in contact with the ground and work its way up through and eat books and wood and other things. If we had a really close up of that we could tell if it is termites because then they would leave the frass behind or their excrement or the stuff they chew out and spit out. I think there was some frass. And then it probably is. Okay. Then natural history collections are very vulnerable to many pests and the top shows examples of feathers that have been eaten by case making clothes moths that have actually left those little white casings from their larvae behind and you can see all the loss in the feathers. And there were two of these below butterfly specimens mounted between pieces of glass and in the one on the left varied carpet beetles got in there and have destroyed the specimen. They just consumed it and it would just continue to be consumed because it was still alive in there until we put it through a freezing treatment. Just the specimen is gone but it's a really good example to show. Going back to the 11 step process. Could I interrupt for once? I'm sorry, Delta. I just, I noticed that we had a question about clothes moths and the photo on the preceding slide of the feathers I think was from clothes moths damage. I thought that might be a good opportunity to answer that one. What is the question? The question is what do you do when you have an entire collection that is infested with clothes moths, vacuuming and freezing the entire collection? I think she's not possible. Will traps eventually reduce the population if they're used regularly? Do you know what was done in this case or what should be done? A whole collection is infested. Vacuuming and freezing isn't possible. Will traps, well traps will help but it's the larval stage that is eating the things. It's not the adult stage. And the larvae are kind of hiding in your collection. I'm not sure what your items are but if it's fabrics, they're likely to be not obvious locations like in pockets or under collars or on the edges of rugs. And the vacuuming and freezing are some of the best ways of dealing with clothes moths rather than relying on just trapping, even pheromone trapping. Just because you have to kind of go where the pests are and these kind of pests are likely to be hiding and you're really gonna have to go through and find them if you really want to have some kind of control. But I'll be talking a little bit more about that further in this slide show. I just wanted to get through a few more things and then we'll get back to those. In that 11 step process, the number one that Carol started talking about was the pest management objectives for the site and number one I'm thinking for the people listening in here are that you wanna keep pests away from your museum objects cause you wanna keep them pest free if at all possible. Materials need the most protection, meaning mostly organic objects. And you also wanna keep your buildings as pest free as possible inside so that your collections aren't at risk. Another site management objective in at least in the national parks and I'm sure all museums would be any pests that happen to be a public health threat would need immediate attention. Like if you had an infestation of mice or wasps at the entrance to your museum, something like that. So I just wanted to touch on that. That's number one of the 11 steps. Going back to step four, Carol started talking about knowing your resource. Again, know what your most vulnerable materials are in the collection. Again, the organic materials and I've noticed that protein based materials like wool and taxidermy, specimens and feathers and things like that seem to be a bit more vulnerable to pests than cellulose, although cellulose is also vulnerable. And I guess when you're assessing your museum objects and your historic structures, know the importance of the objects. Are they original or are they reproductions or are they voucher specimens for natural history collections which are very important. You wanna provide your most valuable things with the most secure protection, especially in museum storage. Those are the things you wanna be sure are in field museum cabinets and things like that. And the ecology of the site, Carol was talking about the micro climates and the places where pests can hide. I interject one more item here, certainly. On the site description on the ecology of the site, you have to really know where your utilities are, your heating system, where's the basement, where are the pipe wall junctions, the electrical lines going in and out because those are access points for critters and they know they're access points because they feel air going through them if it's not a tight seal. Like sometimes you'll have plumbers who will put in a pipe and then there's like, you know, a huge diameter around there where you can almost put your fingers through and that's a great access point for mice or other critters. So again, you really need to know your site history and exactly everything that's going on on that little site and the people you work with. Thanks, Barbara. Yeah, and who's using it is the employee lunch room right next to the exhibits. You know, those are things that you have to think about also because IPM is a very interrelated process and you have to think like the pests. You have to think like, what are they looking for? Where do they like to hide? Where are they coming in? And that's why step five, identifying pests is very important. You have to, if you can identify the pest, then you can learn, you know, is it a museum pest for one thing? And museum pests can be not only insects that we're talking about today, but they're also microorganisms or vertebrates like mice, rats, birds and things like that. Anyway, one thing I want to add to on the pest definition, we think of things that are actually damaging our items, but sometimes they're just perimeter invaders that just happen to wander on in and they're not really trying to eat any of your items. They just happen to get in the building looking for a cool space to hang out, but they can become a source for domested beetles or other protein feeding items, so that's why it's important to monitor and have a tight zip. Yeah, and a pest, an organism that jeopardizes your site objective, in our case, the site objective would be the preservation of historic or natural resources and public education through your interpreted museum collections. So that's why these kind of things are pests to us. And so that's why we're becoming familiar with the museum pests and the damage they do. And you want to know about their biology and that could tell you how to manage them. Like, are they attracted to light or repelled by light? And sometimes for our museum pests, the adult stage would be attracted to light and the larval stage would be avoiding light, such as with the domesteds or carpet beetles. You want to know how high they fly, what's their life cycle and reproduction, what are their food preferences? You know, what, if it's a wood boring test, become familiar with their exit holes and frass to figure out what kind of tests you're dealing with. And then are they particularly big motactic, meaning most insects and rodents like to run with their bodies up against a surface, like a wall. But some insects are even more a big motactic and like silverfish and cockroaches and domestic larva. They like to squeeze into little cracks and crevices and corrugations and corrugated boxes and things like that. And you can always get help identifying insects from people like your state cooperative extension, office entomologists, and there's a lot of really good reference books available now. So we're kind of dividing the insect pests based on what they eat in your collection. We have things like protein eaters, which would be like what's pictured here are the life cycles on top of the black carpet beetle from the smaller larvae. And then they, as they grow, the larvae shed their skin several times until they pupate into an adult. That's what's showing there. Cellulose eaters. And I'm gonna be talking about these in the next few pictures too. And wood borers, things that feed on mold like book lice and springtails and things like that. Things that feed on starch like silverfish and firebrats. Then omnivores, things that eat everything like cockroaches and crickets. My favorite are the protein eaters. They're the ones that I deal with a lot in my work and in my building. I have, in the middle of the picture, I have pictured the larvae and the adult of the varied carpet beetle. And that's the big pest in my building. They've kind of been here since the beginning. And they, all these kind of pests, they eat museum objects like feathers, wool, silk, horn, taxidermy, insect collections, leather, hair, skin products, things like that. So they are a big problem in museums. And then the clothes moths are shown on top. Those are webbing clothes moths. And it shows them the larva, the adult, and also the frass, and then also the holes that they're making. This is Carol. I wanted to interject something about the frass. We mentioned earlier that it's the excrement or in wood critters it's excrement plus what they dig out of the wood. And the frass is really important. If you folks are responsible for managing museum items, which you are, you really should start a frass collection. Barbara's got a great damage collection and a frass collection. And I've got a great frass collection too. And maybe when we get to the wood pest, we can pop up the termite frass later on. You want me to, okay. Yeah, I guess we do a wood section and we'll pop up that in a minute. Thank you. Okay, yeah, I think I'm gonna have to kind of rush through this a little bit because we're getting short on time. Anyway, the clothes moths and the domestic beetles, which include carpet beetles and hide beetles, they're the only creatures that can actually digest keratin that's in your hair and your horn. And that's their function in nature is to decompose that when, you know, there's dead animals out in the woods. But they're very, very serious damaging museum pests. And spider beetles also were the protein, protein eaters like that too. And identifying damage, I have a few pictures showing this kind of typical grazing where they'll like eat the surface off of an object before they actually burrow in and make a hole. And more often it's the clothes moths rather than the domestic beetles that do this grazing. And the top picture is like a suede glove that has grazing and cases from case making clothes moths. The middle is a spelted wool hat and then there's sheepskin, feathers. And then in the middle of the bottom there's tunneling from a hide beetle that has damaged a Civil War cartridge box. And at the bottom there's a Civil War woolen hat that's been grazed by clothes moths. The park service at one time had a lot of freeze dried animals in there. Exhibits back in the 80s instead of conventional taxidermy. And they were even more susceptible to the clothes moths and carpet beetles. And this one exhibit, the three pictures on the left were in one wetlands exhibit and these items were just totally destroyed and crawling with insects. And the picture of the little woodmouse on the bottom was eaten from the inside out with case making clothes moths. And it looked like the little critter was eating a strand of spaghetti, but it was actually cases of clothes moths coming out of its mouth. And also the dungeness crabs were freeze dried and they had become infested by both clothes moths and carpet beetles. I wanna add one item on the freeze dried critters. We had learned through that experience that it's not good to freeze dry anything larger than like a squirrel because the meat doesn't ever really freeze. So it's best to taxidermy the larger animals. And we're not using the freeze dried specimens in any future exhibits in the park service. I have another picture showing some more damage to a wool uniform on top and insect collection in a museum was totally destroyed by varied carpet beetles. And picture over to the right, I have a little pointer showing one of the shed larval skins of a carpet beetle. And that's one of the signs of to look for when you're trying to identify pest damage. The feather below has, again, has the frass and cases from case making clothes moths. I think I skipped one. I did wanna talk about the cellulose eaters. They eat things like herbarium collections, basketry, paper and things like that. And those include insects like cigarette beetles, drugstore beetles, grain beetles and grain moths of various types. And I have a picture showing a museum exhibit that had real dried corn in it. And that exhibit became infested with Anguamas grain moths. And so that's why we don't, we do recommend against having any real food or grain material in museum exhibits. It's just a close up of a herbarium specimen that was damaged by drugstore beetles. And you can see the holes in the item and the frass. I've also seen live infestations of cigarette beetles and also even book lice in herbarium collections. Once you really get in and inspect with a waking light you can even see book lice which are very, very, very tiny little insects. So you really have to do inspections. We just have, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we just have about 10 minutes left. I was wondering if we could answer some of the questions that were in the chat box or do you, is that a right or do you wanna go through one or two more of these before we, we just have a couple of questions backed up there. Okay, tell me what the questions are. Well, there's, I saw two that were sort of similar, are ants and are fleas considered museum pests. What's that ants on it? I don't see the fleas. The only ants or fleas that actually feed on museum materials would be carpenter ants that would feed on wood. Or live in wood, excavate wood. But you can find ants in your collections and... It's good to identify your ant because some are protein feeders and some are not. So it means they're getting into feed on something. So use them as a clue that something's going on. Okay, okay. And then here's a question. If you were starting from scratch, what recommendations do you have to prepare a new temporary storage area off site in preparation for an emergency collections move of a mixed collection? And that feeds into a different question we had. Yeah. Well, I would always make it, you know, as well-sealed as possible. I guess we can post later. I have a good information sheet on things when you're building a new museum storage area, things to build in from an IPM point of view. And I can make a point of having that posted to the site afterwards. Okay, great. We can start on the discussion topic. But temporary, you want to make sure you start out as clean as possible. Excuse me. You might compartmentalize things that are similar as well. And I think Barbara's referenced that. I did see one of the questions earlier, so they were starting out with a 30,000 foot building. That was my next one, yeah. Right, and that's a huge task. I think the first thing I do is get blueprints and figure out where your ductwork is and where your in and outs are on the building access points. And then figure out where you're gonna put different types of items, what type of shelving. I've seen pretty low budget places where they don't have the money for museum storage cases, but they'll put like items together and then they'll use different types of plastic to shelf manage shelves as mini storage areas, kind of draping plastic around them so that they can actually create micro habitats and keep it drier in certain areas for different types of materials. I think you would recommend sort of attacking all the problems at once then of the different types. Well, I'm prioritizing, like Barbara said in the beginning, you gotta prioritize what your items are. If you've got protein or you've got cellulose items, that's the priority and those should get your most attention and monitoring. And the more barrier layers you can put between the outside and the object in the pest, the better. That's why we recommend museum storage cabinets with the good gas getting. Always put your most vulnerable material in that kind of field environment. The one question about fleas too, I wanted to just address that real quick. If you have fleas, that means something's living in the building or there's birds and the bats in the attic or raccoons or something getting in somewhere and some of the duck work or between the walls. You don't want fleas in the building. First of all, if the animal dies in there, whatever the host is, it's gonna have a domestic beetle issue feeding on them and you'll have an odor issue, which is even worse. But fleas do carry bubonic plague and you just don't want fleas in the building. That means something's going on. They're another indicator. I just wanted to show you the slide of the kind of damage that silverfish do. Again, it starts out as kind of a grazing and they actually eat paper. Their favorite thing is eating starch so that you find them in books and bookbindings, but they like coated papers. And so these pictures show the one on the left shows that they've actually been eating an instruction sheet from a fumigation chamber, which is interesting. And on the right, they've actually been eating copies of museum catalog cards and they have a really fine frass that's brown and elongated but very fine. So if you see that kind of, you know, about the width of a human hair type frass, that might be from silverfish. I've seen them on a whole set of Thomas Jefferson books where they ate the binding, they like the starch. For wood destroying insects, wood borers and powder post beetles and things like that, the larva spends most of their life tunneling through the wood, so often the only thing you're looking, you're able to see most of the year is their exit holes or the frass coming out of them. And we have on this site a good sheet where you can identify the kind of insect it is from the, actually the signs of damage that they do. And it's important to identify them so you know whether that species is likely to re-infest the same wood again. That's the page on the exit holes, Elsa, if you wanna take that up at this. We are almost at time. Well, first off, I can quickly mention this. What you're looking at here is dry wood termite frass and I wanted to, if you look at real hard and blow it up a little, you can see that each pellet is six-sided. So normal subterranean termites that we're all familiar with, most of us are, do not create frass like this. They're, this is unique to the dry wood western termite or dry wood termites. They don't need a moisture source so they're really difficult to manage. Pretty much the only way to manage them is fumigation or completely seal them out of the building. So they're, I put it in because it's a real distinct critter. They withdraw as much water as they can out of the pellet before they pop the fecal pellet out. I'm a dead giveaway. Yeah, and I saw a question on diatomaceous earth. That is one of the low-risk kind of pesticides that you can use as a crack and crevice treatment for museum areas. These low-risk, pesticidal dust like diatomaceous earth, boric acid, or silica aerogel are things that are pretty safe to use and they are effective on many of the museum pests if they come into contact with them. Oops. Nobody else with my screen went blank. Yeah, mine too. I guess we're out. I see your question, Vicki. We will be posting a list of resources that have been discussed here. There is a discussion page on the ConnectingToCollections.org webpage and we can continue having our conversation there. And also, I will be posting as many of the links as I've been able to capture. I think I've gotten pretty much all of them. OK, and I'll go ahead and let you post the rest of the pictures from my slide show. Oh, OK. OK. OK, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Sorry that we've gotten pretty much run out of time here, but they've been some great questions and I hope it's been helpful for everyone that came here and participated today. I've posted a link to an evaluation and I'm hoping that you'll take the time to go look at it and let us know your thoughts about this webinar. We would like to know what you think worked and if you have any advice or further questions, we'd be happy to respond to those. So I want to thank Barbara and Carol so much for taking the time to be here and answer these questions. You're welcome. Thank you to Learning Time and AASLH and the IMLS and I hope that you will join us for our next webinar. It's going to be on August the 2nd and it's another, with this partnership with the National Park Service, Teresa and Volinger is going to be speaking to us about cold storage for photographic material and there will be more information there and on our Facebook page and on our website. So thanks very much, everyone. Thank you.