Mermaid magic
Florida dancers remain underwater for a half-hour at a time
The Weeki Wachee Springs auditorium sits 16 feet underground. Wooden benches face a glass wall, which stays shrouded in curtains. But three or four times a day, the curtains rise to reveal clear water.
A ledge juts out, and below, the bottom drops down to a 20-by-3-foot opening, from where about 120 million gallons of water rush from the planet’s interior each day. That small opening leads to caverns, still not fully mapped or explored, that go down more than 400 feet.
Back up top, a soft-shell turtle swims past the glass wall. Maybe a mullet, or a gar. And then the mermaids. Yes. “Mermaids.” Actually, they are women with tails zippered over their legs, performing choreography underwater and demonstrating the impressive modifications the body can make when it’s required to hold its breath during exercise.
One of the newest additions to the group of swimmers is Paisley, a 19-year-old from Indialantic, Florida. Paisley is her show name. The mermaids don’t publicize their last names, to keep the magic alive and also because of stalkers.
Paisley stays underwater for the full 30 minutes of each show, never surfacing. She glides through the spring’s current. When she needs a breath, she draws oxygen from a hose connected to the ledge.
The mermaids’ hosebased breathing method was developed in the 1940s after Newton Perry, who had once trained Navy frogmen, bought the site. He started playing around with ways that people could inhale air without having unwieldy tanks against their spines. The hoses he finally installed — which constantly push out air from
a compressor — function today pretty much the way they did when Perry opened the park in 1947.
Paisley had never been a competitive swimmer or a dancer. But when her college classmate, already a mermaid, offered her a private audition, she took the bait.
The first test was a 400yard swim — 200 with the current of the Weeki Wachee River and 200 against. Then she had to dive down in front of the auditorium’s windows. Smile. Wave. The management also wanted to see how long she could naturally hold her breath — she managed 30 seconds at the audition. The trainers could work with that. She was in.
The first few months as a mermaid were a process of becoming. Before she could really get started, she had to get scuba-certified, CPR-certified and lifeguard-certified.
When all her certifications were in place, it was time for Paisley to meet the hose. Trainers told her to go into the water, grab her lifeline and stay underwater for 5 minutes without freaking out.
Paisley eventually began practicing the mermaid moves to music, with mere human legs. No one gets a
tail until they reliably keep their legs together.
New identity acquired, Paisley was nearly ready for performances. But there are some concerns associated with remaining underwater, breathing only intermittently. First is the acceptable limit for holding your breath. According to Teresa Alentejano, a worldrenowned synchronized swimming coach and physiology researcher, a 1995 paper set the stopping point at 40 seconds. Thanks to the hoses, mermaids never have to hold their breath longer than that.
Jim Chimiak, medical director of the nonprofit Divers Alert Network, said the health concerns about staying 20 feet down are minor. The water pressure where the mermaids perform is about 1.5 times the pressure a body experiences on land, an increase that doesn’t require decompression. Divers do have to take care to equalize their middle ears, though, which they can usually do by simply swallowing.
The concern is more surface stuff. Their bodies might not restore the natural oils that the water carries away. The women also have to hydrate well, as each entry into the water will, in Chimiak’s words,
“stimulate a diuresis.”
Synchronized swimmers’ heart rates decrease quickly when they begin to hold their breath, even though they’re exerting themselves. This is the body’s way of tricking itself into wanting to breathe less.
Alentejano even speculates that because the untrained body can curtail or cease nonessential functions to hoard oxygen for the heart and brain, the synchronized swimmer’s body might have expanded on that — including muscles required for swimming as essential, and thus saving oxygen for them.
Paisley probably hasn’t overanalyzed herself in this way. She mostly thinks this is a great first job. She likes her betailed sisters and the way children react to her.
Every day or so, Weeki Wachee Springs State Park uploads a new “Tail Mail” video, in which a mermaid answers a letter from a young fan. On Jan. 18, Paisley read a letter from Paige, age 6. “Could you turn me into a mermaid, please?” Paige asked.
“I would love for you to be a mermaid,” Paisley told Paige in a video reply. “So maybe one day when you’re old enough, you can come here, and I’ll give you a magic potion.”