JACKSON — Some of the sea’s most menacing sets of jaws and dorsal fins whirl around Mary Wilds’ head and shimmy up her leg like undersea puppies when it’s lunchtime at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

Yes, most would consider themselves live bait in such a situation. But here, a bucket of tasty treats from native waters makes it safe for the Vicksburg native to be in the water.

“They’re not afraid of me,” Wilds said of her uncanny cool when the majestic, underwater flight of the stingray and the focused meander of the bonnet shark leads it right into her mask. “They know we’re there to feed them.”

Wilds, a medical billing coder by day, has taken her passion for swimming — her “exercise of choice” since childhood — to the Jackson museum twice a month to feed aquatic life in the freshwater Pearl River Aquarium and the saltwater Mississippi Sound tank.

Once her 25 to 30 pounds of diving equipment and all-important bite-proof gloves are on, Wilds serves up a menu only a striped bream or a speckled trout could love — freshly chopped shiners, frozen calamari, tiny krill and large Canadian night crawlers.

“Sometimes, they’ll eat the whole bucket,” Wilds said. “It’s exciting. Some divers like to just get in there and get out…. I like to play!”

Her husband, Nathan, a retired Air Force master sergeant, once was stationed in Guam and got her interested in diving.

“He’s been diving since the mid-’70s as a hobby,” Wilds said. “He had lived in Guam and said, ‘Hey, the diving’s great. You gotta do it.’” Private lessons in Jackson led to her diver’s certification within a year. Seeing divers clean tanks at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium during a trip there inspired her to take her newfound talents to new depths.

“Early this year, we started making some calls asking about divers,” Wilds said. “I contacted the science museum and they said they’d love to interview us. We both went, interviewed, and it’s been awesome since then.”

Outings seem as fun for young museum visitors buzzing with oohs and ahhs with each swoop of a hungry fish or nibble from a hesitant green turtle.

“He really liked that,” said Shane Bray, of Lake Providence, La., who takes his sons Hunter, 6, and Mason, 3, to the science center at least once a year. “We always enjoy it.”

Though loose and full of energy underwater, Wilds, one of seven volunteer and staff divers at the museum, has found no two fish are alike when it comes to how they like their food.

“I can’t get the gar to eat out my hand yet, and I usually feed them on the side,” Wilds said. “The shark wants to see the fish first. I feed the ray open-handed.”

A stingray’s eyes and plate-like teeth are on opposite sides of its body, framed by cartilage like a shark. Near the tail is its barbed stinger, used only in self-defense when it’s accidentally stepped on while buried in sand or when it’s simply mishandled.

The most notable death involving a stingray’s barb was in 2006, when conservationist megastar Steve Irwin was fatally pierced in the chest as he reportedly swam too close to a ray while filming a documentary off the coast of Australia’s Queens-land province.

“They are actually safe for us to touch,” said museum aquatic biologist Karen Dierolf.

The museum allows certified divers older than 18 to volunteer to clean tanks and feed wildlife, Dierolf said.

“They come and go, usually stay a couple of years,” Dierolf said. “They’re real troopers, and the public loves it. I don’t know what it is about putting a person in there, but it makes it more exciting.”

In Wilds’ case, it’s excitement and an infectious curiosity that fuel each swim with her finned friends, said her daughter, Delisa.

“She’s just like a big kid out there,” she said.