Photo by Mic Smith
Hometown: Grew up on his family’s horse farm in Rantowles, “a little blip between Charleston and Ravenel.”
Claim to fame: Curator of large exhibits and dive safety officer at the South Carolina Aquarium.
Education: Holds a bachelor’s degree in equestrian behavior and a master’s in international agriculture, both from the University of Georgia.
Career path: During grad school, Postell researched medicinal plants in Costa Rica while earning multiple scuba diving certifications. He returned to South Carolina and became a dive instructor before joining the Aquarium staff.
Little-known fact: Played on the UGA polo team as an undergraduate. “I still have some of my jerseys.”
Favorite hobby: Horticulture. Postell enjoys gardening and running greenhouses on his days off.
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The Great Ocean Tank at the South Carolina Aquarium is a breathtaking display. At 42 feet deep, it’s North America’s deepest saltwater exhibit, and it carefully recreates the underwater topography and ecosystem found off the coast of South Carolina.
Spellbound visitors can spend hours watching more than 500 animals including sharks, turtles, fish and rays swim by the massive observation windows holding back 385,000 gallons of water. During dive shows held numerous times a day, guests can even talk with divers inside the tank via an underwater communication system.
What they don’t see is how much work goes into making this miniature ocean thrive. For more than 20 years, that task—from maintaining the quality and temperature of the water, to the care and feeding of 45 very different species of marine life—has been in the hands of Arnold Postell, curator of large exhibits.
“That’s one of the fun things about being a biologist. It’s understanding the animals, their care, their well-being and making those adjustments continually to keep it a thriving and healthy ecosystem,” he says.
While caring for the animals is a massive logistical challenge requiring 15 different feeding techniques, the most time-intensive task for the aquarium’s four full-time employees and an army of volunteer divers is scrubbing the massive observation windows to keep them clear and clean of algae.
“The cleaning is nonstop. We are never done. The animals, they poop every day. Algae grows on the walls,” Postell says. “So every day, except Christmas Eve, Christmas and Thanksgiving, we’ve got divers in the water three to five times a day.”
Postell doesn’t get to dive inside the tank much these days. “The volunteers do the majority of the diving for us in the exhibit,” he says. His responsibilities take him diving offshore to collect new specimens, help the Department of Natural Resources plan new artificial reefs, and survey the health of natural ones. He’s also the organizer of a lionfish spearfishing derby that harvests only the invasive Indo-Pacific reef fish that prey on juvenile native species.
“If you have to work,” Postell says, “it’s a pretty fun job.”
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Divers wanted
If diving inside the Great Ocean Tank sounds like fun, the Aquarium is accepting applicants for the volunteer dive team. Candidates must be at least 18 years old, hold advanced open water scuba certification, and commit to a minimum of 16 hours of diving each month. For more information, visit scaquarium.org/volunteer.