"I Don't Have a Life Plan": Ben Kappel on 12 Years Behind the Scenes at Georgia Aquarium

Ben Kappel grew up in Cartersville after moving down from Long Island as a kid, graduated Cartersville High in 2008, and now spends his days running the guest dive program at one of the largest aquariums on the planet. The connection came full circle in a very small-town way: Logan had been asking around for months for anyone who worked at Georgia Aquarium, and it turned out a past guest's brother was exactly that person.

"I don't have a life plan" as a career strategy

Ben is upfront that almost nothing about his path was planned. He bounced between psychology, communication arts (which turned out to require drawing skills he didn't have), and business before landing on psychology with a political science minor picked up during a semester abroad in Sweden. After graduating Georgia Southern in 2012, an advisor offered him a last-minute, semester-long hall director job with zero relevant experience. "I don't have a life plan, sure," was his answer — a line that became the theme of the next decade. He only got into diving because it counted as his college gym class, and he only found Georgia Aquarium because he was feeling unfulfilled in student housing and applied for an unpaid dive-operations internship on a whim in 2014. He's been there ever since.

The engineering behind a 6.3-million-gallon tank

Ocean Voyager, the habitat that houses Georgia Aquarium's whale sharks and manta rays, holds 6.3 million gallons of water — still the largest single aquarium habitat in the world despite Georgia Aquarium no longer holding the overall size record. The filtration system cycles all 6.3 million gallons roughly every hour and a half. Even the shape of the tank is deliberate: it's designed specifically to encourage a swimming pattern that's healthier for the whale sharks, not just to look good through the glass. At night, lights over exhibits like the coral-heavy Tropical Diver habitat dim and shift color to simulate a natural day-night cycle — and sharks, Ben explained, don't fully sleep the way mammals do. They go through half-brain rest cycles so one hemisphere can keep them swimming while the other rests.

Sharks, celebrities, and a 1,300-person volunteer army

Running a facility with around 600 employees and roughly 1,300 volunteers means an enormous amount of invisible coordination — a food-quality team that rejects fish with something as small as a foggy eye, a life-support team, guest services, and dive teams doing underwater maintenance in corrosive saltwater. Ben's also had a front-row seat to the aquarium's higher-profile moments: filming segments with Animal Planet, working around Shark Week productions, and casual run-ins with celebrities including Shaquille O'Neal. "Very casual, just normal people," he said of most of it — though he still gets a kick out of the fact that his job occasionally involves camera crews.

Why he hunts invasive lionfish for fun

Ben's conservation angle isn't preachy — it's mostly small, practical asks. He walked through how Campbell's turtle soup pushed sea turtles toward extinction decades ago, which is why touching them today is such a hard rule, and why something as ordinary as sunscreen can erode turtle shells and damage coral reefs. On the flip side, he's an enthusiastic participant in lionfish derbies: lionfish are beautiful, invasive in the Atlantic after being released from home aquariums, and have no natural predators here, so divers are encouraged to hunt them. "I get to eat great afterwards," he said. "It's so silly, it's my little part." His overall pitch isn't zero-waste perfection — it's picking one habit to change and letting that be enough.

Listen to the Full Conversation

This recap only scratches the surface. Ben also gets into the mental side of scuba diving under real pressure, the ironic fact that he genuinely dislikes swimming, and a very memorable rapid-fire round covering Lord of the Rings, the Chili's Triple Dipper, and his oddly eclectic Spotify Liked Songs. Catch the full episode below.