World Sea Turtle Day
This year, we are marking World Sea Turtle Day together with the Zagreb kindergarten “Malešnica”.
The project “Sea Turtles” was organised in cooperation with the children from the “Sovice” group, with whom educators Đana Harbaš Bikić and Martina Hribar spent three weeks carrying out various activities to help the children get to know sea turtles even better.
The children painted them with tempera paints and pencils, made 3D models from clay and paper, and also created a large cardboard turtle.
Alongside creative work, the children watched a documentary and an educational cartoon about sea turtles, listened to stories about their journey through our Adriatic Sea, read picture books, played by assembling puzzles, and more…
The works created were presented to parents at a small kindergarten exhibition organised on this year’s World Sea Turtle Day.
In order to raise public awareness of the need to protect sea turtles, in 2016 the Croatian Natural History Museum launched the EU project “Collective Actions for Improving the Conservation Status of the EU Sea Turtle Populations – LIFE EUROTURTLES”, the first joint Mediterranean project of coordinated turtle conservation activities.
The project was launched with the aim of research, as well as raising awareness of the need for their timely protection.
The project leader is the Museum’s senior curator, Assoc. Prof. Draško Holcer, PhD, and in addition to Croatia, the project also includes Mediterranean countries of the European Union – Slovenia, Italy, Malta, Cyprus and Greece.