Nobody expected a man stuck at home during lockdown to stumble into one lucky break after another. He made it onto a major Hong Kong newspaper. He was covered by national news sites. A celebrity agent came calling to discuss cooperation. He bought glowing algae from a lab, grew it, and sold it to universities in two provinces. A high-school biology exam used him as a question. He hit the top of a video platform's hot list.
The whole saga started, he insists, because he lay flat and did nothing.
The Glowing Algae
The purchase was simple on paper: he paid handsomely for luminous algae from a laboratory in Fujian, cultured and expanded it, then sold it to universities in Fujian and Shanghai. But what exactly was he growing?
"Glowing algae" usually means bioluminescent dinoflagellates — single-celled organisms like Noctiluca scintillans, the species responsible for glowing seas at night. Waves breaking, a boat cutting through water, a hand stirring the surface: mechanical stimulation makes these cells flash blue.
The machinery is elegant. Inside the cell sit specialized organelles called scintillons, packed with a light-emitting compound (luciferin) held safely by a binding protein. A mechanical touch opens calcium channels; the resulting pH drop releases luciferin, and the enzyme luciferase oxidizes it — releasing energy as blue light. From stimulus to flash takes about 15 milliseconds. The same chemistry lights up fireflies, though dinoflagellates do it in seawater, at blue wavelengths around 470 nm.
That is why the lab bottles looked alive: every jolt of the shelf, every swirl of the flask, set off a cascade of tiny blue flashes.
The Cold-Resistant Spirulina
The second chapter was a different alga. He bought cold-tolerant spirulina strains from one of the world's largest spirulina farms and started a wild expansion-culturing journey.
Spirulina is not actually an alga in the classic sense — it is a cyanobacterium, Arthrospira platensis, a photosynthetic microbe whose filaments twist into tight blue-green spirals. It carries the blue pigment phycocyanin alongside chlorophyll, which is why a spirulina culture turns deep blue-green. It tolerates salt, heat, and alkaline water, which is why farms grow it in open ponds across the tropics and subtropics.
The cold-tolerant part is the interesting wrinkle. Most Arthrospira strains are warm-water organisms, which is why "cold-tolerant spirulina" became a sought-after variety for farmers in cooler regions. Researchers studying strains from the Ordos region in Inner Mongolia found one that grows from 4°C to 40°C and even survives −18°C for 24 hours — far more cold-hardy than the classic strain from Lake Chad. For anyone trying to grow spirulina outside the tropics, such a strain changes the business entirely.
