From WSBTV.com:

Aquarium Nets 2 Big Fish

Facility Expected to Open in November

POSTED: 1:25 pm EDT June 3, 2005
UPDATED: 1:52 pm EDT June 3, 2005

ATLANTA -- Organizers of the new Georgia Aquarium were expected to announce Friday that they have obtained two rare whale sharks, according to reports.

Bernie Marcus, the primary benefactor of the new facility, which is being built in downtown Atlanta near Centennial Olympic Park, was scheduled to hold a 3 p.m. news conference to make the announcement. Marcus has donated $200 million to build the aquarium, which is scheduled to open Nov. 23.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Friday that 12-foot-long fish were moved in a 60-hour operation that started from Hualien in eastern Taiwan earlier this week. The fish arrived at the downtown Atlanta aquarium this morning, the newspaper reported.

Taiwan News reported that the sharks were caught by local fisherman before being transported by airplane to Atlanta.

"We took the sharks out of the sea around 3 a.m. daybreak when they were asleep so that they wouldn't feel scared because of the long trip, amounting to 60 hours to get to Georgia Aquarium," Huang Tung-ping, who is in charge of the Tung-chang fish farm where the sharks had been kept, told the Taiwan newspaper.

The new aquarium will be the only place other than Asia where the public can view whale sharks in captivity, according to the AJC. The aquarium in Okinawa has two whale sharks.

Quoting sources, the AJC reported that the facility spent about $8,000 to acquire each fish.

Whale sharks are among the biggest species of sharks and are also among the largest fish.

According to experts, the whale shark is a gentle giant up to 50 feet in length. They are usually a dark color with whitish spots covering the entire body, and are more commonly found in the Indian Ocean.

wsbtv.com Staff Writer Alfred Charles contributed to this report.

Atlanta will finally have a real tourist trap. I hope to be one of the first to get in!

What about CNN Center?

People make trips to see aquariums. I imagine the only visitors CNN Center gets is from convention-goers' families trying to fill a boring day. Atlanta is a big convention city.

Rendering of the aquarium (I couldn't find the actual aerial shot I saw on the news.)

Aquarium layout

I watched a program on the whale shark on the Discovery channel , and a guy in scuba gear was swimming with it , and it absolutley dwarfed him.
He hung on to the Dorsal fin and said it was unreal how powerful it was just feeling it swim along. Then it decided to do a deep dive and the guy let go as they can dive to increadable depths.

I've seen that show. I loved it.

I love aquariums but am not going swimming with a shark or a whale.

I would swim with whales or a whaleshark. Whalesharks aren't dangerous to anything but plankton.

That aquarium will also need one of those Manta Rays , they can get huge too .

The thing that I find amazing is that the whale shark always has a perfect ring of small fish that swim right in front of his mouth almost at all times. And they have a sucker fish that clings to either their back of the belly and cleans them. I saw that on one of those Imax movies that played at the Omni Theater at the Boston Museum of Science. Really cool.