Currently, I’ve been spending time accumulating the plastic tags from bagged pastries and sorting them into little Latin-named piles like Palpatophora utiliformis and Tridentidae.
It’s an activity that seems to merit a *record scratch* *freeze frame*: You’re in all probability questioning how I acquired into this situation.
It began one snowy winter night after i stumbled upon HORG.com, whose house screen options an official-wanting seal bearing a drawing of a bread tag – one of many plastic ones groceries use to maintain bags closed – and the Latin phrase Fiat Divisa Panem (loosely translated: “Let it be sliced bread”).
HORG stands for Holotypic Occlupanid Analysis Group. It’s a self-described “database of artificial taxonomy” dedicated to plastic bread tags, referred to on the location as occlupanids (this derives from occlu, that means “close,” and pan, meaning “bread”).
It classifies the bread tags into 17 different families, with names like Haplognathidae and Mycognathidae, and 筑後 ランチ 人気 additional divides the doodads by genus and species, for a total of 208 distinct varieties (excluding the “Pseudo-occlupanids,” which have a “hotly contested” taxon that some “occlupanologists” find it “too shut for cladistic consolation.”)
Some are big in Japan; others are present in “a refrigerated niche” and “may want cooler environments.” My favourite is the Spinosacculidae, a uncommon purple one found close to 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 discipline notebook, save for a couple of playful winks. Take the description for Eurycomplector labiopictus, that are printed with little footage of lips: “The splotch-like markings… may certainly be some form of camouflage, akin to the spots on a leopard.”
HORG presents itself as some distinguished assortment of scientists, but in actuality, the “Board of Taxonomy” is simply John Daniel, a 50-one thing San Francisco Bay Space pc graphics and visualization specialist who has meticulously catalogued plastic detritus since 1994. In school, he studied vertebrate zoology and sculpture. While he’s not a practicing biologist, he tells me that he’s “absolutely obsessive about the pure world.”
“Paying consideration to issues that are ignored, unloved, or outright detested is something that I discover appealing – something from ticks to butterflies to earwigs,” Daniel says by way of Zoom from his dwelling office, where 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 floor of someone’s condo. “It really struck me how weirdly biomorphic it looks, like a larval parasite with claws,” he says. “Why does nobody notice these items?”
At that second, “the blinders got here off,” he says. “I started seeing them in every single place.” Taxonomizing the items of trash was his “natural next step.” A pal gave him the URL HORG.com – he prefers the snappier HORG.org, but to his chagrin, someone’s been sitting on it – and he used his rudimentary HTML skills to cobble collectively a site whose design has barely modified over the many years.
International assortment
Today he’s bought a collection of occlupanids contributed by fans from all over the world. Daniel admits that sure areas are underrepresented, including China and some elements of the African continent. And he doesn’t get many occlupanid samples from international locations that don’t have plenty of processed bread, like France. (In the U.Ok., the tags are literally banned as a result of 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 sales go to the worldwide Society for the Preservation of Pure History Collections – however he has gained a small measure of fame.
The phrase occlupanid made it right into a 2010 NPR quiz show, and New Zealand’s Wellington Marine Museum and Research Station as soon as named occlupanids its “critter of the week.” Because certain occlupanids are more likely to grip onto the intestines if ingested, medical researchers used Daniel’s classifications in a 2011 peer-reviewed academic article, crediting him as co-author.
Occlupantology is contagious. Followers 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 will get 20 a month, some of them accompanied by occlupanid samples. “It’s most likely the most fantastic thing in the world,” Daniel says of the letters. He replies to each on HORG letterhead.
I ask him why folks should care about occlupanids. He pauses. “That’s a tricky one,” he says, before declaring the human affinity for categorizing things. As for other on a regular basis objects he’d wish to see classified? Daniel points to single-use flossers. “They’re so biomorphic, probably because they’re meant to be touched by human hands,” he says. “So they’ve developed into these strange shapes.”
To me, HORG’s impracticality is exactly what makes it delightful: As other corners of the internet devolved into a noisy corporate hellscape, this straightforward site remained devoted to the noble, pointless pursuit of taxonomizing items of trash. It is not attempting to be something other than what it is.
As of late, I notice each occlupanid I see, and sometimes I may even label them. I additionally discover myself paying extra attention to the other neglected “creatures” of the Anthropocene – zip ties, wristbands, and the like. The habit of noticing the stuff of the actual world, especially when my eyes are educated on a display screen many of the day, has been a most wonderful reward.