The shore finding model

Where to look

Four hundred and thirty six shores on the west coast of Britain and around the coast of Ireland, ranked by how sheltered and how enclosed they are. Every one of them is a place worth a Saturday. None of them is a prediction that the animal is there.

Thinozercon michaeli is known from five published localities, three in Ireland and two in Wales, and it was last recorded in 1987. Three further Milford Haven localities on this map are records of Phaulodinychus, a different uropodine mite reported by the same 1987 paper. They are shown because they are useful ecological context, and they are drawn differently because they are not records of this animal.

The question this map answers is not where the mite is. It is where somebody willing to turn stones would be spending their time well.

Zoom in before deciding anything. Then open a satellite view of the same spot, because the shore itself is what settles it.

The ranking

The same 436 shores as a list, best first. Sort by any column. Click a row and the map goes there and opens it.

Region Access only the far inland ones

Rank	Where	Region	Hab	Open	From sea	Shore	Path	To record

How the ranking works

Two things are measured, and both are measured the same way everywhere, in Britain and in Ireland alike.

Shelter counts how many of sixteen compass directions see more than three kilometres of open water. Enclosure measures how far you would have to travel to reach genuinely open coast. Every published record sits at least about one kilometre inside shelter, and the five Milford Haven localities sit between eight and fifteen kilometres in. Together the two cut the coast from about forty four percent to about twenty one percent.

The shape you are looking for repeats across all three regions where the animal has been found. A ria, a drumlin bay or a sea loch, sheltered deep into its length, with fresh water arriving at the head. Clew Bay, the Daugleddau and Lough Hyne all look alike in this respect, and that likeness is the search image.

What the map cannot tell you

Read this before you travel

Access is only mapped in part of Wales. Public rights of way were looked up for seven Welsh councils. Every shore outside that area carries a dashed rim and says so when you open it. That is missing information rather than a finding, and it means neither that access exists nor that it does not.
A path near a shore is not permission. Below mean high water the foreshore is usually Crown Estate and generally walkable. The difficulty is the land you cross to reach it. A mapped path does not promise parking, a passable foreshore or a welcome.
Two shores here have already failed on the ground. Black Tar and the Llangwm frontage are houses and gardens down to the water. They are marked. Please do not walk into somebody's garden on the strength of a dot on a map.
Several candidates lie inside protected areas. Whiteford is a National Nature Reserve. Turning stones or collecting in one normally needs consent from Natural Resources Wales, and that is much better established before a trip than after it.
Check the tide. The whole exercise is the hour either side of low water.

Honesty about the ranking

The two starred stretches in Milford Haven, Beggar's Reach and Castle Reach, are lengths of water rather than shores. The 1987 workers were a marine biology group with boat access, and their locality names give the reach and not the bank. Treat those two points as provenance and not as destinations.
Howth scores three out of seven. It is half open and barely enclosed, and the animal was found there anyway. A low score is a reason to look elsewhere first, never a reason to write a shore off.
Whiteford Sands is a caution in the other direction. In August 2026 a rock field by the lighthouse produced the richest mesofauna found on this search so far, at least four families of mites in twenty minutes, at a spot this model scores zero out of seven. No Thinozercon was found there, so that is not evidence the ranking is wrong: a shore can be excellent for mites in general and still be the wrong kind of place for this particular animal, which is known only from sheltered, enclosed, estuarine shores. What it does show is a limit of scale. The sheltered pocket holding the life was metres across, with bare wave washed rock a few metres further on, and nothing here works at that resolution.
One hundred and twenty one shores on this map, almost all of them Scottish sea lochs, carry a faint halo. They were previously filtered out by a substrate test built from a one kilometre land cover raster. That test was never validated outside Wales, so it has been set aside. Those shores qualify on shelter and enclosure and carry no substrate evidence in either direction.
Three of the eight published records were placed from written descriptions rather than from mapped coordinates.
Three of the eight are also in Ireland, and they carry most of what is known about this animal outside one Welsh estuary. Westport and Howth are the only evidence it lives anywhere other than a drowned river valley in Pembrokeshire, so they count fully in everything measured here. The map simply opens on Wales, because that is where a trip realistically starts.
A shore is a two kilometre square of coast, not a car park. The point sits on a real coast cell, but the mites will be wherever the structure is, which may be a few hundred metres away.

If you go

Look in the upper littoral and the supralittoral, which is the band of tidal debris and the stones just above it. Halbert found the animal at Westport “in some numbers under stones on the sea-shore”, and the 1987 records came from “tidal debris and under stones in the upper littoral and supralittoral zones”. Whiteford, which this model scores as exposed, produced abundant mites in the strandline at the point, which is a useful reminder that the layer narrows the coast and your eyes find the stone.

If you check a shore, whether or not you find anything, that is worth more than any of this. Please say so, and it will be recorded.

Sources and licences

Records	Halbert 1915; Athias-Binche 1982; Pugh, King and Fordy 1987. Each point on the map carries its own citation.
Coastline	GSHHG, Wessel and Smith, public domain. Nineteen Welsh tidal channels were digitised in by hand because GSHHG classes them as rivers.
Rights of way	The councils' own definitive map data by way of rowmaps.com, Open Government Licence v3.0. Attribution to each council.
Open access land	Natural Resources Wales, Open Government Licence v3.0.
Roads, rivers, greenspace	Ordnance Survey Open Roads, Open Rivers and Open Greenspace. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0.
Base map	© OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database Licence.

This map is a sampling aid. It is never a claim that any animal is present at any location. Prioritisation, not prediction.