Driving through the urban sprawl of Little Rock, Arkansas, Brittany, AKA Mermaid Sparkles, remarks: “I’m shit out of luck, being a mermaid here.”

Sparkles, as you may have inferred, is one of a growing number of performers – several of whom are followed in Cynthia Wade’s documentary MerPeople – trying to make it in a nascent but rapidly expanding industry. Or, if you are the rightwing proselytiser Amanda Grace, whose speech on the subject at Trump Doral recently went viral, “a division of the kingdom of darkness and highly technologically advanced”.