If I were to supply a value for nano- or microsecond, I would have thought that an integer would have been sufficient, and not to have supply a string for the value.

few minutes later ... From the pod with original emphasis (untested if this would solve the issue):

DateTime::Duration->new( ... )

This method takes the parameters "years", "months", "weeks", "days", "hours", "minutes", "seconds", "nanoseconds", and "end_of_month". All of these except "end_of_month" are numbers. If any of the numbers are negative, the entire duration is negative.

All of the numbers must be integers.