Seeing Spirulina: Within, Between, and Beyond Institutional Research

Abstract

This three-part dissertation is born from diverse—sometimes overlapping, and even contradicting—rituals of contemporary Spirulina engineering and science-making. Drawing from my participation in institutional Spirulina research (Spirudemia) and do-it-yourself (DIY) algoculture, the text opens with stories foregrounding the skilled practices and material cultures of home growers, small-scale farmers, Spirulina academics (Spirudemics), commercial cultivators, philanthropists, and third worlding engineers whose ways of conceptualizing, cultivating, experimenting with, and relating to Spirulina have sculpted my own technoscientific vision. Next, I follow voyaging, botanizing agents of empire and Spirulina’s earliest industrialists to establish the emergence of Spirudemia. Diving into Spirudemia’s beginnings, I situate Spirudemics’ taken-for-granted traditions—and their attendant research trajectories and material outcomes—in a long arc of historical entanglements with colonial bioprospecting missions, land dispossession, and plantation-scale monoculture. Emerging from critique in the final chapter, I channel my labor into realities and futures in which Spirulina cultivation is collaborative, decentralized, and democratized. Combining microscopy and geometry-based computer vision, I showcase a partially-automated image processing protocol that tracks the helicities of Spirulina trichomes grown in low-cost, plug-and-play, lab-scale photobioreactors (PBRs). I demonstrate how time-series shape data collected daily across cultivation periods allows humans to interface with the filamentous cyanobacteria via a “language of shape.” Colony morphology histories reveal Spirulina’s preferred growth mechanisms, alterations in bacterial cell wall architecture, morphological acclimation timescales, and the emergence of multiple morphotypes within a single population. From a more-than-human engineering standpoint, shape data may inform maintenance interventions, and enable assessments of culture health and growth consistencies within typically black-boxed bioreactor ecosystems from the perspectives of their microbial inhabitants.