Zack Rago helps reveal the plight of the world’s coral reefs
01 Jun 2017
Documenting the Disaster Down Under
By Shannon Burgert When Zack Rago signed on as a camera technician for the documentary Chasing Coral, he had no idea he’d wind up as a key member of the cast. “I never anticipated I’d be on the big screen. It’s not what I signed up for,” he says, laughing. At the time, the filmmakers weren’t aware of Rago’s lifelong obsession with coral. “I’m a coral nerd,” he says. That’s putting it lightly. Rago, who grew up in Arvada, got to tag along with his dad, a high school assistant principal, as he took students on field trips every summer to Hawaii’s Big Island, snorkeling and tide-pooling and falling in love with the diversity of the ocean. Rago started his first fish tank (with corals, of course) at 13, and he delighted in the conundrum that corals pose taxonomically. In high school he began to raise corals at a marine aquarium shop.‘It’s about stepping up to protect what we can while we can.’Rago, 24, received his degree in evolutionary biology and ecology from the University of Colorado Boulder, all the while working for the shop. “I had my own little laboratory with any coral species in the world that you could imagine, at my fingertips,” he says. So when Rago ended up on the film crew for Chasing Coral as a camera technician, his extensive knowledge became useful, and his passion became a compelling part of the documentary. (Rago also got to dive with his childhood hero, Dr. Charlie Veron, who discovered more than 20 percent of the world’s known corals.)
