wildfilms: Wild Day at Reef Celebrations

Bright and early Saturday morning and the crowds started as soon as Reef Celebrations opened its doors.Here's an enthusiastic visitor who came by bicycle!
The colouring station was a hot favourite!Jun shares about Singapore's first coral nursery to the young visitor.Debby of the Hantu Bloggers shares with more young visitors about Pulau Hantu.More young visitors at the TeamSeagrass booth!

In fact, young visitors were a big part of the people who came to Reef Celebrations!They made themselves at home at Kok Sheng's talk about "Life and Death on Chek Jawa".

But everyone of all ages enjoyed the exhibits, like this one by the Toddycats.The talks were really well attended!Sijie and Chee Kong shared about our special Knobbly sea stars on Cyrene in their talk about "Wishing on a Star".During the talks, the kids asked the best questions! Here is Jeff explaining to the question by a child "How do you breathe underwater?". Collin brought the dive gear displayed at Jun's booth so that Jeff could show how it was done.
Shufen shared about our "Green, Mean, Photosynthesizing Machines", i.e., seagrasses.

We were very fortunate today to have YC to be our MC for the talks. He also brought his MP3 player to provide background music! Something we totally forgot about! Thanks YC.

Our Celebration Guestbook is a puzzle mainly so that we can scan in everyone's comments later (which will happen after we get some sleep).
And Marcus was among the most hardworking of photographers today.

Everyone is working very hard.Sijie is quickly polishing up his talk, while Andy had brought his laptop to download the phenomenal amount of filming he did today.Debby and Jeff are also busy working on their talks. Jeff seems to be having issues with his computer.Jeff takes the opportunity to learn from Siva about how to twitter. So now Jeff is no longer a dinosaur. He is now a twit!

With the large crowds of family groups, it was wonderful to have Vilma and friends of Cicada Tree Eco Place and the Raffles Institution people provide exciting programmes for the kids with the theme MAD for turtles (Make a Difference for turtles).There were all kinds of games to help kids understand the threats to sea turtles and what we can do to make a difference.
Story-telling about turtles by Vilma herself.Which was really captivating!Chay Hoon's pretty marine themed pebbles are big hit. Chai Joo, Vilma and Chee Kong hold some examples.
The colouring station was a BIG hit with the kids.

The wonderful drawings of marine life and nudibranchs drawn specially for IYOR by Chay Hoon are simply irresistable.Even the volunteers HAVE to have a hand at some.And who is responsible for the "fiery" nudi?The artists with their handiwork.Obviously very proud of it.Abby does a more muted version.

Before we packed up the booths, the volunteers went around to one another's booths. Something they didn't get to do during the day as they were busy with their own.The folks from the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation shared about their work. They are completing year fourteen of an ongoing expedition to map and monitor the world's coral reefs. To date, PCRF's research vessel is the only ship continually at sea studying coral reefs on a planetary basis.Kelly from the Underwater World Singapore explained their latest Young Marine Biologist Award launched as part of IYOR.

We were very fortunate to have Abigayle today to tell us more about the work of the Blue Water Volunteers.
Jun shared about the coral nursery and the intriguing coral exhibits.The Toddycats shared about their very popular exhibits! We finally got to have them all to ourselves.And we finally got a good look at the entire Adopt a Star booth without the crowds of people wanting to adopt them. Here is November sharing about the Stars.

And we had a good look at Debby's booth and she was in the middle of blogging about the event! How cool is that?!We posted the latest programme events on a whiteboard, that many people kept adding pictures to.In fact, the pictures morphed quite a bit throughout the day. See if you can spot the changes!

What a wild and wacky time we had at Reef Celebrations today!

More blog entries about the day!