Miami Mermaid Saving The Earth
/The world was blessed 33 years ago today (on April 17) with the birth of a real-life mermaid who has made it her mission to save our planet’s waters. I’m speaking about Dame Merle “Eco Mermaid” Liivand. Born in Estonia, Merle was a very sick child with autoimmune disease. At 12, her lungs almost collapsed. That’s when Merle adopted swimming as her natural, home-grown cure. Today, Merle lives on Miami Beach and is defying all odds with her endurance swims.
Even to this day not completely healthy, Mermaid Merle has won countless swimming competitions, set quite a few Guinness World Records and most importantly has carried a torch worldwide in an effort to clean our waters. Incredibly, most of her records were set by swimming with a monofin mermaid’s tail, thus the mermaid nickname.
In 2023, Merle broke her own world record (a 26.2-mi swim in a monofin) right here in Biscayne Bay by swimming an unbelievable 30 miles over 14 straight hours. Incredibly, during her swim, she also collected 35 pounds of trash to raise awareness about the pollution in our waters.
Merle is alarmed about how many bottles and plastics she pulls from our waters every day. “I concentrate not on being an Olympic or world-class athlete, but rather to give back to the water,” reflects Merle. “I get sad and nearly cry when I see what people are doing. We are all suffering when we pollute.” Merle works individually and as part of organizations in this endeavor. She is an eathday.org World Cleanup Day Ambassador, and was the reason there is a “Mermaid Law” law in Nicaragua that prohibits plastic bottles and explosives from being put in the ocean. In 2022, she also spoke at Davos to world leaders about how she was losing her lungs and now is trying to save Earth’s lungs, our oceans.
Merle laments, “Microplastics are my grave concern. They are showing up in our wildlife and in human blood and our guts. As health concerns grow, this has turned into one of the greatest issues in our society and it affects people in everyday life.” She held up a container and polluted it with a facial scrub product to show how easily microbeads get into our water supply.
At the press conference at Miami Yacht Club, Merle celebrated her birthday and helped unveil a special surprise. Voltari, a boat company that makes innovative all-electric boats that frees the waters of pollution and noise, named their latest boat “Merle”. CEO Cam Heaps and crew christened it with Mermaid Merle and, in a rare moment, she rode in the boat rather than swimming beside it.
During Merle’s press conference she explained that her Olympic dreams are already threatened. “I am sad about the conditions for the Olympics in Paris. The Seine River water is so dirty that they are thinking of canceling the marathon swimming event altogether. It is an emergency for the Olympics, and it is the same emergency for Biscayne Bay. Our oceans and bays and waterways are dying,” remarked Mermaid Merle. “I can’t attempt a new world record here in Miami because the water is too polluted.”
If you want to follow this dynamic lady’s environmental efforts, you can check her out at instagram.com/aquamjerle and merleliivand.com.
