Beach-study fun crests at low tide

It's fat city in Puget Sound country, with some of the lowest tides of the season arriving this week right at midday picnic time.

There are primo beachcombing opportunities to enjoy all week. Pick a beach, any beach: Golden Gardens, Carkeek Park, South Alki, Lincoln Park, or even hop in the car and head north to Richmond Beach Park or south to Seahurst and Des Moines.

Captives of downtown Seattle offices towers can even kick off their shoes and enjoy the low tide at the Olympic Sculpture Park's pocket beach, just minutes and worlds from their cube farms. There's much to discover, even at the city's most urban beaches.

Watch the sea lettuce drift in cold, crystal salt water as it slinks down the beach; tickle an anemone with a wet finger. And this week trained naturalists will be on hand to reveal the secrets of the low tide: Who knew bright orange sunflower stars have 15,000 tube feet, enabling them to zip along at 10 feet a minute? That barnacles spend most of their life standing on their head? Or that geoducks can live to be old-growth clams, clocking 150 years in the same spot?

More than 35 volunteer naturalists were at city beaches on Sunday, with the pleasures of the low-tide beach to share, including tips to preserve and protect Puget Sound.

The results of some 20 years of hard work and investment in sewage-treatment plants, reducing industrial pollution, and restoring habitat are already there to see, in the diversity of life squirming, squirting and scuttling in the low tide zone.

At Golden Gardens, a slow-lane drama unfolded as the tide dropped Sunday. Clams startled the strutting crows with zesty squirts. Red rock crabs spangled clean, gray sand, and stately herons stalked eel-grass beds with Zen grace. And everywhere, the kids did what they do best.

"Mermaid's scarf!" said Kaia Hrachovec, 8, of Seattle, flinging a wreath of seaweed around her neck, flashy as a feather boa. Barefoot, with her knees crusted with sand, hair windblown and eyes alight, she flashed the birthright joy of any Puget Sound kid.

The unusually low tides that began Sunday will keep dropping through the week, bottoming out below minus four on Wednesday. Midday tides will still be low through Saturday.

Busy this week? Try again on the holiday weekend over July Fourth, when the low tides return, and naturalists are on the beaches every day to share the wonders of this special place.

"We live in the big city, but our parks on the water are full of life," said Janice Mathisen, beach naturalist coordinator with the Seattle Aquarium. "We get that question all the time: 'Does anything really live there?' People are just floored. And it never gets old."

The program, sponsored by the Seattle Aquarium and other partners, now in its 10th year, has grown to 153 volunteers, each with more than 20 hours of training, both in the classroom and on the beach. Some come back every year, buoyed by sharing.

By now volunteer Bonnie Storm of Seattle knows every beach has its special joys: red octopus at Richmond Beach, piddock clams at Golden Gardens, sand-dollar beds at South Alki. As she walked the beach at Golden Gardens, Storm took time to explain the garden of seaweeds in every shade and texture, from deepest burgundy pot-scrubbers to slick-smooth nori.

But it was the moon snail, moving at, well, a snail's pace, from eggs it had just laid that earned the top kid rating from Kate Larue, 8, of Seattle: "Cooooool," she said, then set off to her next discovery.

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com