These days, I’ve been spending time amassing the plastic tags from bagged pastries and sorting them into little Latin-named piles like Palpatophora utiliformis and Tridentidae.
It’s an exercise that seems to merit a *file scratch* *freeze body*: You’re most likely questioning how I acquired into this example.
It started one snowy winter evening after i stumbled upon HORG.com, whose house display screen features an official-wanting seal bearing a drawing of a bread tag – one of the plastic ones groceries use to maintain baggage closed – and the Latin phrase Fiat Divisa Panem (loosely translated: “Let it’s sliced bread”).
HORG stands for Holotypic Occlupanid Analysis Group. It is a self-described “database of artificial taxonomy” dedicated to plastic bread tags, referred to on the site as occlupanids (this derives from occlu, meaning “close,” and pan, meaning “bread”).
It classifies the bread tags into 17 different families, with names like Haplognathidae and Mycognathidae, and further divides the doodads by genus and species, for a complete of 208 distinct varieties (excluding the “Pseudo-occlupanids,” which have a “hotly contested” taxon that some “occlupanologists” discover it “too close for cladistic consolation.”)
Some are huge in Japan; others are present in “a refrigerated niche” and “may choose cooler environments.” My favorite is the Spinosacculidae, a uncommon purple one discovered near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe with an “oral groove” that resembles a turtle.
HORG hovers between earnest scientific endeavor and elaborate hoax. The species descriptions take on the formal tone of a field notebook, save for a number of playful winks. Take the outline for Eurycomplector labiopictus, which are printed with little pictures of lips: “The splotch-like markings… could certainly be some type of camouflage, akin to the spots on a leopard.”
HORG presents itself as some distinguished collection of scientists, but in reality, the “Board of Taxonomy” is just John Daniel, a 50-one thing San Francisco Bay Area laptop graphics and visualization specialist who has meticulously catalogued plastic detritus since 1994. In college, he studied vertebrate zoology and sculpture. Whereas he’s not a training biologist, he tells me that he’s “absolutely obsessed with the natural world.”
“Paying attention to things which might be ignored, unloved, or outright detested is something that I discover interesting – anything from ticks to butterflies to earwigs,” Daniel says via Zoom from his home office, the place he’s proudly hung a framed show of occlupanids.
Like most of us, he’d encountered bread tags his entire life. However he didn’t see them – really see them – until he was 24 and saw “this little plastic doodad” on the ground of someone’s apartment. “It actually struck me how weirdly biomorphic it looks, like a larval parasite with claws,” he says. “Why does nobody discover these things?”
At that second, “the blinders came off,” he says. “I began seeing them everywhere.” Taxonomizing the items of trash was his “natural subsequent step.” A pal gave him the URL HORG.com – he prefers the snappier HORG.org, however to his chagrin, someone’s been sitting on it – and he used his rudimentary HTML expertise to cobble collectively a site whose design has barely modified over the a long time.
Global collection
At this time he’s bought a group of occlupanids contributed by followers from all over the world. Daniel admits that certain areas are underrepresented, together with China and some parts of the African continent. And he doesn’t get many occlupanid samples from nations that don’t have a lot of processed bread, like France. (Within the U.K., the tags are literally banned due to ingestion dangers.)
At its core, HORG is about curiosity and appreciation for man-made detritus. Daniel earns no cash from his endeavor – all proceeds from T-shirt gross sales go to the international Society for the Preservation of Pure Historical past Collections – but he has gained a small measure of fame.
The phrase occlupanid made it right into a 2010 NPR quiz present, and New Zealand’s Wellington Marine Museum and Analysis Station once named occlupanids its “critter of the week.” As a result of sure occlupanids usually tend to grip onto the intestines if ingested, 筑後 ランチ medical researchers used Daniel’s classifications in a 2011 peer-reviewed academic article, crediting him as co-creator.
Occlupantology is contagious. Fans have organized a tightknit Discord and the r/occlupanid subreddit, which has greater than 1,200 members. Then there are his audience’s snail mail letters – Daniel gets 20 a month, a few of them accompanied by occlupanid samples. “It’s most likely probably the most great factor on this planet,” Daniel says of the letters. He replies to each one on HORG letterhead.
I ask him why folks ought to care about occlupanids. He pauses. “That’s a troublesome one,” he says, before pointing out the human affinity for categorizing things. As for different everyday gadgets he’d prefer to see categorized? Daniel factors to single-use flossers. “They’re so biomorphic, probably as a result of they’re meant to be touched by human palms,” he says. “So they’ve evolved into these unusual shapes.”
To me, HORG’s impracticality is precisely what makes it delightful: As different corners of the internet devolved into a noisy corporate hellscape, this easy site remained dedicated to the noble, pointless pursuit of taxonomizing pieces of trash. It is not attempting to be something aside from what it’s.
Lately, I discover each occlupanid I see, and sometimes I may even label them. I also find myself paying extra consideration to the opposite neglected “creatures” of the Anthropocene – zip ties, wristbands, and the like. The habit of noticing the stuff of the true world, particularly when my eyes are trained on a screen a lot of the day, has been a most wonderful present.