Ahoy, landlubbers! Are you aware of the Swiss Merlympics? That’s right, Mermaid Olympics. As in, people wear fish tails and do swimming competitions in water.
One of the American competitors this year is Mia Sim from Utah County.
At a pool in Lehi, Sim made a big splash as she jumped in the water to show off tricks and some of the swimming for the competition. Her legs were fully covered in a custom white, red and gold mermaid tail. It looks like a koi fish and weighs about 25 pounds.
Mermaiding is an art to her, a form of self-expression, like dance.
“There's so much joy,” she said. “It's kind of weird to be underwater smiling with your eyes open, but it's calm enough for me that I can get through it and just enjoy what I’m doing down there.”
The international Merlympics are held every two years and have five different swimming events. They include elegance, speed and rescuing a person underwater.
“This is a legit sport,” she said. “It's a lot harder than most other things that I've done.”
Sim has been a competitive cheerleader, dancer and tried her hand at some car racing. Of all of those things, mermaiding “is the most strenuous physically.” The Merlympics though isn’t fully about physical prowess, it’s also about raising awareness for marine conservation. As a self-described “desert mermaid,” Sim focuses on water in Utah and places like Utah Lake.
“It's just gross,” due to the algal blooms and die-off of native plants. “No one wants to go see it. No one wants to care about it.”
As a mermaid, Sim gets hired for a lot of events. She uses those opportunities to talk about water conservation, and her tail is a great starting point — especially for children.
“Because we, as the adults at this point, don't have as much influence as they will eventually,” she said. “So it's teaching that curiosity. And that's easier with a character like a mermaid or Mickey Mouse … because it's now suddenly enticing, because it's a fantastical view of things.”
First, she wants to get people just to care about water and then change their habits. The average family uses 300 gallons of water a day at home. So conservation isn’t simply turning the water off when people brush their teeth. It’s a more holistic household approach like shorter showers or “being aware of what type of laundry you're doing, what fabrics need what, how many things can you do by hand,” Sim noted.
One of her “biggest passions” is using rain barrels to collect rainwater because they’re legal in Utah. That water can be used for watering plants and outdoor laundry.
“Even though they’re little, they do make a big difference.”
But can a mermaid really make a difference? Performance is “integral to all activist movements,” said Northwestern University performing arts professor Tracy Davis. She researches performance activism and wrote a paper on the beautiful photographs the community of mer activists produce and their impact on conservation.
People might feel something when they look at the mermaid’s imagery and “that can help us key into the ecological messages that they connect with their work.”
There’s also the chance it just stops at “wow, that’s a cool picture,” she noted.
“We can say that seeing somebody bungee jump or hang glide looks amazing, too,” Davis said. “But that doesn't help us improve air quality.”
Potentially some mer-folk may post photos, call themselves activists, but then not do anything that advances their message.
“That doesn't make you an activist. It makes you a slacktivist.”
There are examples though, Davis said, where mermaiding may have made a difference. One activist made a video swimming with manta rays which was shown at a major endangered species conference.
“That changed the organization’s capacity to leverage influence on behalf of the factors that were reducing habitat for manta rays.”
A video of the same activist mermaid swimming with sharks played on Australian national TV and got millions of views. It’s hard to say, though, if that actually translated into change.
But “it's a mammoth task to try to reverse the damages that we've wrought,” Davis said. So, “why not try everything? Right? Why not try this along with everything else?”
Sim, the Utah County mermaid, said her water conservation work really has made a tangible difference. She’s invited people she’s met at mermaid events to take part in projects like planting native species at Utah Lake. And they’ve actually come, continuing those conservation conversations.
In fact, she’s not alone in her work. There are other Utah mer-folk who are also activists. Sim said mermaiding and conservation go hand-in-hand.
“For mermaids, we are labeled as caretakers of the sea,” she said. “So our goal is to improve anything water related.”
