Seeing Spirulina: Within, Between, and Beyond Institutional Research
Name
ganapathy-tganapat-phd-meche-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
22.32 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c1f8ed30994bb9858a0b91553e38cf7e
Author(s)
Ganapathy, Turga
Advisor(s)
Cordero, Otto X.
Date Issued
September 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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