Mai Khao's Turtle Release: Community and Courts Unite for World Sea Turtle Day

At dawn on June 14, a row of palm-sized Chelonia mydas hatchlings sat cupped in gloved hands along the packed-sand line where Sirinat National Park's casuarinas meet the Andaman Sea. One by one, as senior judiciary officials, conservationists and volunteers leaned toward the waterline, the turtles were placed on damp sand — and disappeared into the surf in three pulls of their front flippers.

The release was the centrepiece of a Big Cleaning Day held at Mai Khao Beach, Phuket, on June 14, 2026, organised in the days before World Sea Turtle Day [ref:1]. World Sea Turtle Day falls on June 16 — the birthday of Dr Archie Carr, the American biologist whose mid-twentieth-century fieldwork turned the tide on a species that had been hunted nearly to extinction across the Indo-Pacific.

Dozens of turtles entered the water that morning at Mai Khao, the longest and least-developed beach on Phuket island, a strip of coast that stretches 11 kilometres north through Sirinat National Park's protected lands. Those same lands shelter the nesting grounds that Chelonia mydas females return to each season between November and March — pressing their bodies into the fine sand above the tide-wrack, excavating chambers with their rear flippers, laying clutches of roughly 100 eggs and returning to sea before sunrise.

That cycle — nest, hatch, crawl, swim, grow, return — takes roughly 20 to 50 years for a green turtle to complete. The animals released on June 14 were the product of monitored nests, incubated by park rangers and volunteers to protect them from the threats that have narrowed the species' range across the Andaman: fishing nets, coastal development, plastic ingestion and the poaching of eggs and adults alike.

Adisak Tantiwong, President of the Appeal Court, presided over the event alongside executives of the Court, members of the Andaman Natural Resources Conservation Foundation, local government representatives and private-sector partners. Beyond the release itself, participants joined a coordinated beach cleanup — clearing the strandline of plastic waste before the next monsoon swell could drive it back into the neritic feeding grounds where young turtles spend their first years drifting and growing.

The event connects to a national policy frame. Thailand's adoption of the BCG (Bio-Circular-Green) Economy Model commits the country to expanding marine protected areas and incorporating coastal communities as active stewards — not spectators — in resource management. At Mai Khao on June 14, that commitment was visible and tactile: a senior judge kneeling in the same sand as a park ranger and a village volunteer, all watching the same flipper-prints dissolve in the foam.

What survives in that foam matters far beyond Sirinat National Park. Green turtles foraging in the Andaman Sea graze on seagrass beds — Thalassia hemprichii and Halophila ovalis are the main species found between Phuket's western bays and the outer Similan Banks. Seagrass meadows cycle organic matter, capture carbon, and serve as nursery habitats for the juvenile fish that sustain inshore fishing communities along the Phang Nga and Phuket coastlines. A recovering turtle population is, in this sense, a reliable proxy for reef and seagrass health across the entire Andaman system.

For the communities whose livelihoods orbit that system — the fishing families of Phang Nga's outer villages, the shellcraft artisans pressing nacre into souvenir-grade panels — a Sirinat turtle entering the sea in June carries more than conservation symbolism. It is a marker of water quality, seagrass extent and an inshore economy that still, narrowly, holds together.

The Mai Khao Marine Turtle Foundation, which coordinates year-round monitoring of the beach's nesting sites, has recorded nest counts that biologists describe as cautiously encouraging. The year-round absence of heavy tourism from Mai Khao's northern reaches — a function of park boundaries rather than chance — gives the turtle programme the quiet margin it requires. Eggs incubate undisturbed; hatchlings cross dry sand at night without artificial light pulling them landward.

That quiet margin is worth naming. In a stretch of coast increasingly negotiated between development, restoration and regulatory reform, the nesting ground at Sirinat remains one of the few pieces of Andaman shoreline that has stayed, for now, close to what it was when the first Chelonia mydas dragged herself above the waterline here [ref:1].