Shark Dive Program Questioned

ATLANTA - Vikas Chinnan stood over a tank at the world's largest aquarium, peering down at the world's largest fish species. He was wondering what it would be like to jump in and frolic beside the whale sharks.

The creature approached, eerily quiet. It was longer than a Ford Expedition, impossibly elegant as it banked into a turn at the tank's edge, flexing its gray, massive, mottled form into a parabola of living flesh.

"Oh man," muttered Chinnan, 32, one of eight divers who had paid $290 for the privilege. "I hope they fill up our oxygen tanks, because I'm going to be breathing hard."

Whale sharks are as harmless as they are imposing, preferring plankton to people. But with the Georgia Aquarium launching its Swim With Gentle Giants program this month - allowing a dozen swimmers and divers a day to enter the sharks' habitat - marine experts fear it is the humans who could pose a threat.

Two Sharks Have Died

Much of the trepidation has to do with the 21/2-year-old aquarium's track record with whale sharks. Last year, two died for reasons that baffled the staff. Today, the "best hypothesis," according to spokeswoman Meghann Gibbons, is that they reacted poorly to a chemical treatment used to combat parasites.

Jean-Michel Cousteau - son of famed underwater explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau - was critical of the swim-with-the sharks program, given that the aquarium was not 100 percent sure why the animals died.

"They think maybe those sharks died because of some chemical treatment," said Cousteau, founder of the nonprofit Ocean Futures Society in Santa Barbara, Calif. "I certainly don't think there's something to learn from someone swimming with a whale shark."

George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, agreed. The whale sharks, which roam hundreds of miles in the wild, are stressed by their confinement, he said. And they probably will be harmed further by close proximity to humans - and by potential exposure to germs exotic to them.

"It'd be the equivalent of you being in a bedroom for the rest of your life after having had the ability to walk around freely," Burgess said. "And then having 20 people come join you in your personal space every so often."

The Georgia Aquarium is not the only one in the United States to offer visitor diving programs. But it is the only one outside of Asia to attempt to keep whale sharks, a little-understood animal that can grow as long as 60 feet. The controversy over the swim program has magnified a tension inherent in many big-ticket aquariums, which have proliferated around the globe in recent decades.

Although they typically promise to bolster marine education and advocacy, these aquarium programs also are entertainment venues competing for tourist dollars.

Aquarium Staff Is Confident

The Georgia Aquarium's staff has defended the program. The four whale sharks kept in captivity, they said, are monitored loosely. Bruce Carlson, the chief science officer, is confident they will coexist with the daily stream of visitors.

"If we're wrong and these animals look like they're having negative reactions, we'll pull the program," he said.

Spokesman Dave Santucci noted that the fish were used to people swimming among them. Last year, he said, humans made about 5,000 trips into the tank for maintenance.

Santucci also noted that the aquarium was funding significant whale shark research projects in Mexico. The goal in Atlanta, he said, is to turn visitors into lifelong advocates for threatened ocean creatures.

"It's one thing to come down here and see them through the glass," he said, "and it's another to get in the water and experience them in their environment."

Chinnan and seven other certified scuba divers were in a small classroom recently far from the aquarium's crowds, getting a briefing from lead dive master Edward Ryan.

The genial Ryan, who formerly ran the dive program at Walt Disney World's , told them to keep a 5-foot distance from the whale sharks and the thousands of other fish in the 6.3 million-gallon tank. He exhorted the group to follow instructions from the three staff members who would be diving with them and to stay close together "so that we don't stress the animals," he said. "That's the whole key."

Moments later, the divers were crawling down a ladder and into the tank.

After the dive, Tracy Eden, 46, called it "amazing."

"I think this gives people a different appreciation for the ocean," he said.