What have a core group in Raffles Museum Toddycats been busy with these past few months?
ICCS Otters are a team within the Raffles Museum Toddycats who coordinate the annual International Coastal Cleanup, Singapore. Held in September annually, this event involves some 4,000 participants from 40-60 schools and organisations who collect, categorise and remove marine trash on our shores. The team, which comprises several veterans, begin work in February and end in October, organised around five formal meetings with lots of field trips, emails and phone conversations in between.
public guiding and coastal cleanups
Marcus Tay is a veteran volunteer for Raffles Museum Toddycats! and International Coastal Cleanup Singapore. He has completed various exhibitions specimen guiding sessions and is the 2012 ICCS zone captain of Pulau Ubin.
Yang Yi Yong joined Toddycats & ICCS recently. He is currently Deputy Zone Captain for North East and also engaged the public at various Toddycats exhibitions including Festival of Biodiversity.
It is now August and the team has finished the preliminary recces, the registration, the ICCS Organiser’s Workshop, just finished the ICCS Site Buddies Briefing and are in “Phase IV: Execution”. We are finishing up Site Recces with Organisers and soon, it will be September and show time!
In 2008, Raffles Museum Toddycats added one more role to the coastal cleanup contributions by sending a team to initiate the Pandan Mangrove cleanup as an Organiser. Staff and students of the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore were roped in to tackle what was then a Category 5 site. We have been at Pandan Mangrove for four years now, clearing and documenting the marine trash there with others and the site is looking much better!
This year, Toddycats have been tasked with setting up a new site at Berlayar Creek in Labrador Park. Our mission at the cleanup is to work with a small group of 20 and conduct a sensitive mangrove cleanup on 29 Sep 2012: 3.00 – 6.00pm. We will take great care to minimise impact while we are at work there!
Look out of the recruitment post next week and join us for a meaningful event in the month of September!
