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 activity that appears to advantage a *record scratch* *freeze body*: You’re in all probability wondering how I obtained into this situation.
It began one snowy winter night after i stumbled upon HORG.com, whose residence screen options an official-wanting seal bearing a drawing of a bread tag – one of many plastic ones groceries use to maintain luggage closed – and the Latin phrase Fiat Divisa Panem (loosely translated: “Let or not it’s sliced bread”).
HORG stands for Holotypic Occlupanid Analysis Group. It is a self-described “database of artificial taxonomy” devoted to plastic bread tags, referred to on the positioning as occlupanids (this derives from occlu, which means “close,” and 筑後 ランチ 人気 pan, which means “bread”).
It classifies the bread tags into 17 completely different families, with names like Haplognathidae and Mycognathidae, and further divides the doodads by genus and species, for a total of 208 distinct sorts (excluding the “Pseudo-occlupanids,” which have a “hotly contested” taxon that some “occlupanologists” discover it “too close for cladistic comfort.”)
Some are large in Japan; others are found in “a refrigerated niche” and “may choose cooler environments.” My favourite is the Spinosacculidae, a rare purple one discovered 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 outline for Eurycomplector labiopictus, that are printed with little photos of lips: “The splotch-like markings… may indeed be some form of camouflage, akin to the spots on a leopard.”
HORG presents itself as some distinguished collection of scientists, but in actuality, the “Board of Taxonomy” is simply 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. While he’s not a practicing biologist, he tells me that he’s “absolutely obsessive about the natural world.”
“Paying attention to things which are ignored, unloved, or outright detested is one thing that I discover interesting – something from ticks to butterflies to earwigs,” Daniel says via Zoom from his residence office, the place he’s proudly hung a framed display of occlupanids.
Like most of us, he’d encountered bread tags his complete life. However he didn’t see them – really see them – until he was 24 and noticed “this little plastic doodad” on the ground of someone’s apartment. “It actually struck me how weirdly biomorphic it seems, like a larval parasite with claws,” he says. “Why does no one notice these items?”
At that second, “the blinders came off,” he says. “I started seeing them everywhere.” Taxonomizing the items of trash was his “natural subsequent step.” A good friend 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 abilities to cobble together a site whose design has barely changed over the a long time.
International collection
At this time he’s got a collection of occlupanids contributed by fans from around the world. Daniel admits that sure areas are underrepresented, together with China and some elements of the African continent. And he doesn’t get many occlupanid samples from international locations that don’t have a lot of processed bread, like France. (Within the U.Okay., the tags are literally banned as a consequence 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 international Society for the Preservation of Pure History Collections – however he has gained a small measure of fame.
The word occlupanid made it right into a 2010 NPR quiz present, and New Zealand’s Wellington Marine Museum and Research Station once named occlupanids its “critter of the week.” Because sure 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 gets 20 a month, a few of them accompanied by occlupanid samples. “It’s in all probability the most great factor on this planet,” 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 troublesome one,” he says, earlier than declaring the human affinity for categorizing things. As for different on a regular basis objects he’d like to see labeled? Daniel points to single-use flossers. “They’re so biomorphic, probably as a result of they’re meant to be touched by human fingers,” he says. “So they’ve advanced into these unusual shapes.”
To me, HORG’s impracticality is exactly what makes it delightful: As different corners of the web devolved right into a noisy company hellscape, this simple site remained dedicated to the noble, pointless pursuit of taxonomizing pieces of trash. It isn’t attempting to be anything apart from what it is.
Nowadays, I notice each occlupanid I see, and generally I can even label them. I also find myself paying extra attention to the other overlooked “creatures” of the Anthropocene – zip ties, wristbands, and the like. The behavior of noticing the stuff of the real world, particularly when my eyes are educated on a screen most of the day, has been a most fantastic reward.