Stand in front of the Ocean Voyager window long enough, and the room goes quiet by itself. It happens when the whale shark comes through: a spotted shape about the length of a city bus, moving far slower than something that size has any right to, close enough to the glass that people stop talking mid-sentence and just point.
His name is Yushan, after the highest mountain in Taiwan, and he is the reason the Georgia Aquarium is the only place in the United States where you can see a whale shark up close. The aquarium turned 20 in November 2025, and two decades in, he is still the thing people come downtown for.
The habitat was built around animals his size: 185 tons of acrylic, 4,574 square feet of viewing windows, and more than 50 species sharing the water with him.
Swim alongside the world’s largest fish
Journey with Gentle Giants puts a very small number of people into Ocean Voyager itself: about half an hour in the water, two and a half to three hours all in, snorkeling on the surface or on scuba if you hold an open water certification.
You are in there with the whale shark, manta rays, a green sea turtle, and a few thousand other fish, with a dive team alongside you the whole time. Whale sharks run somewhere between 18 and 32 feet as adults, and no photograph prepares you for one of them passing overhead.
The schedule runs on a handful of slots, and there is no waitlist, so it is the kind of thing you either book on the day it opens or watch someone else post about. If you would rather stay dry, book Georgia Aquarium tickets and watch him from the other side of 61 feet of window, or from inside the 100-foot acrylic tunnel that runs underneath him.
One thing to know before you go: a whale shark’s mouth can be more than four feet wide, but its throat is only about the width of a quarter. Despite being massive, it feeds by filtering tiny shrimp and krill from the water, making it perfectly safe to swim alongside.
How the world’s biggest fish ended up 250 miles from the sea
The idea for the Georgia Aquarium came to Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot co-founder, during a flight home from Israel. After discussing it with then-Governor Roy Barnes, Marcus and his wife Billi toured 55 aquariums in 13 countries before deciding to build their own. Marcus put in $250 million, while Coca-Cola donated the nine-acre site next to Centennial Olympic Park.
The result was Ocean Voyager, a 6.3-million-gallon saltwater habitat and one of the largest single exhibits at what remains the largest aquarium in the Western Hemisphere. Bringing its animals to Atlanta was another feat: they traveled roughly 8,000 miles from Taiwan to Atlanta in a UPS Boeing 747, each in a 25,000-pound fiberglass tank equipped with life support and a window for veterinarians to monitor them.
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Once the tanks arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson, cranes lifted them off the plane before police escorted them through the city. The gamble paid off: 3.7 million people visited during the aquarium’s first full year, and attendance surpassed 45 million by its 20th anniversary.
For the last two decades, the Georgia Aquarium has worked with scientists to study whale sharks, including co-producing the first complete shark genome map with Emory and tracking more than 1,000 individuals in the Yucatán through satellite tags and photo identification.