Mae Namo's Sixth Nest: A Leatherback Super-Mum Returns to Hat Thai Mueang

The clock on the Marine National Park Education and Research Center's drone controller reads 22:15. On the feed, a pale shape the size of a boulder separates from the incoming swell and begins its slow, deliberate crawl up Khao Na Yak Beach. Park rangers confirm the identification immediately: it is Mae Namo, back for her sixth nest of the 2026 season [ref:1].

Leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) are the largest reptiles alive. A full-grown female can weigh close to 900 kilograms and measure nearly two metres from nose to tail. Their shells are not the hard, sculpted scutes of a green or hawksbill turtle but a mosaic of tiny bones embedded in a leathery, oil-soaked skin — flexible, hydrodynamic, built for the open ocean rather than the shallows. Mae Namo is somewhere in that range: a known individual whose satellite tag and unique skin markings have let the rangers of Khao Lampi–Hat Thai Mueang National Park follow her season by season along this thirteen-kilometre stretch of white sand in Phang Nga Province.

Six nests in one season is remarkable. Most leatherbacks manage three to five clutches before their bodies signal enough. Six means Mae Namo has crossed from the deep Andaman to this beach and back again more than half a dozen times in the space of a few months — each round trip burning enormous reserves of the jellyfish she hunts in open water. Each clutch contains roughly eighty to a hundred eggs; the ones she planted on the night of June 19 will incubate in warm sand for fifty-five to sixty-five days, emerging as hatchlings sometime around mid-August.

The rangers watched her dig, lay, and cover the nest entirely from the air, keeping a respectful distance that left no human scent near the eggs. Drone-based monitoring has become standard practice at Hat Thai Mueang: the aircraft records the nest's GPS coordinates with precision, the data goes directly into the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR) database, and rangers then fix a protective bamboo cage over the nest to deter ghost crabs and stray footsteps.

Hat Thai Mueang's strength as a nesting ground was not guaranteed. Ten years ago these beaches were cleaner in theory than in practice: ghost nets and plastic debris washed ashore regularly after monsoon swells, turning the foreshore into a hazard for nesting females and emerging hatchlings alike. Volunteer groups — among them the Khao Lak chapter of Trash Hero — began systematic night clean-up patrols that removed tonnes of waste year by year. The DMCR has credited that sustained community effort, alongside stricter exclusion zones for bottom trawlers, with the gradual return of leatherback females to this coastline [ref:2]. Mae Namo, in a very direct sense, is the embodiment of that result.

The biology here connects outward to the whole Andaman food web. Leatherbacks feed almost exclusively on jellyfish; a thriving leatherback population signals a productive, plankton-rich ocean. The very conditions that drive the southwest monsoon — upwelling of cooler, nutrient-heavy water from depth — also concentrate jellyfish near the surface and within reach of Mae Namo's seasonal migrations. June is technically off-season for leatherback nesting at Hat Thai Mueang, where the main window runs November through February. A sixth nest in the final week of June is unusual even by leatherback standards, and speaks to the individual flexibility that has kept this lineage — essentially unchanged in form — alive for 110 million years.

Visitors to the national park during the nesting and hatching seasons are asked to follow simple protocols: no torchlight on the beach after dark, no campfires near the tide line, and a wide arc around any bamboo stake or cage. The monsoon darkness that makes these beaches atmospheric and moody is also what Mae Namo needs. She navigates by the faint reflected light of the open sea, and artificial brightness on the shore can turn her back into the water before she lays a single egg.

Within two months, Khao Na Yak Beach will briefly become one of the most animated places on the Andaman coast: a hundred or more hatchlings, each the size of a child's hand, racing toward the water on an incoming tide. The park team will be there to count, record, and shield them. And Mae Namo — somewhere in the deep water beyond the reef, feeding, building reserves — will, by every indication her sixth nest provides, be calculating her next return.