Low tide delights local beachcombers

At low tide Saturday morning on Carkeek Park beach, local naturalists gathered around what they call "Whispering Rock." Put your ear close, and it doesn't so much whisper as snap and click, like the sound of frantic knitting.

On a holiday-weekend morning with rain threatening, Whispering Rock drew a small, enthusiastic crowd eager to see a universe of creatures that's almost invisible until you get close.

Lying nearby were some strange artifacts that well-meaning people sometimes remove, thinking it is man-made junk littering the beach. A group of volunteers from the Seattle Aquarium beach-naturalists program were available to dispel that notion. (Hint: It has something to do with moon snails.)

In late spring and early summer, the lowest tides occur in daylight hours and provide the best opportunity of the year to find the life of the sea exposed to easy view. At midday Saturday, the tide was 2.5 feet below the average low, and a beachcomber could walk some 60 yards out beyond the high-tide mark.

From now through July, the Aquarium stations naturalists at low tides on local beaches — South Alki, Golden Gardens, Lincoln Park, Richmond Beach, Des Moines and Seahurst, as well as Carkeek — to educate the public about wildlife teeming by the shore.

Dan Dulay from Greenwood checked the Aquarium schedule to plan his family beach outing.

"If I Google 'tides,' I get a table I can't read," said Dulay. Instead, he searches "Seattle Aquarium Beach Naturalist." When the naturalists are out, he knows it's a good time to come look.

Whispering Rock is encrusted with huge, volcano-shaped thatched barnacles. The sloped sides of each barnacle are covered with tiny, separate barnacles. Colonies of small black mussels crowd between the barnacles, and a small limpet, also covered in tiny barnacles, slowly traverses this bumpy landscape.

The clicking sound is the barnacles moving inside their shells.

While the top of the rock is covered in icky, mud-brown seaweed, blazes of color at its base attracted the little kids.

Eliana Leischner, 2, of Fremont, visiting with her mom, dad and big brother, had just touched a purple starfish. On the other side of the rock, people knelt gingerly on the stones and dipped down low to peer at a peach-and-white sea cucumber, clinging to an overhang with splayed feet.

Bright-orange sea cucumbers gleamed in another crevice. And in a pool at the bottom of the rock, fat little sculpin fish swam around a blue-gray mottled starfish.

Walking to the rock from the metal bridge that crosses the railway line behind the beach, visitors stopped every few yards to look at something wondrous. A big sunflower starfish with 16 legs, orange-red with purple tips. An empty heart cockle shell, its profile a perfect Valentine. A seagull on the water's edge, preying on a flounder in the sand.

What looked like a dead crab was, in fact, evidence of crab vitality. As the crab-shell carapace was gently lifted at the back, it swung open like a jewel box, empty of all living tissue. It's a discarded suit of armor: The crab, grown too big for its shell, had molted to grow a new one.

But the weirdest things, all over the beach, were something only a naturalist might stop for: At first, each appeared like the broken top of a vase buried in the sand. But lift it, and it's rubbery, not hard. It's the precise color of the sand.

Your next guess might be that it's a gasket, or the ripped-off business end of a toilet plunger.

But it's not man-made. It's the egg casing of a moon snail, containing perhaps half a million microscopic eggs. The snail, about the size of a softball, feeds on clams beneath the sand. When it comes time to lay eggs, the snail exudes mucus and spins around until the tiny eggs are embedded in this smooth, Gehry-like construction made of sand and mucus.

Brad Johnson, one of the volunteer naturalists, said the Aquarium encourages beachcombers to "not mess with the animals."

Touch creatures gently with a wetted finger, he advised. If you lift a rock, put it back the way you found it. Look after this fragile ecosystem and understand that at these low tides, the creatures you see are more exposed and more vulnerable than usual.

And if you are lucky enough to see an octopus — there's maybe one sighting per summer at Carkeek, and Johnson said it would be "blow-away fantastic" to come across one — don't go too close. The octopus bites with poisonous venom.

"For the most part, there's nothing dangerous here, except maybe the octopus," Johnson said.

If a beachcomber is bitten by it, the best treatment is to scald the wound in water as hot as you can stand. "Go to the nearest Starbucks," Johnson said. "A second-degree burn is much better than an octopus bite."

The Seattle Aquarium naturalists will be at local beaches Sunday from noon until 3:30 p.m. and again Memorial Day from noon until 3 p.m. Low-tide naturalist visits for later weekends are listed at the Seattle Aquarium website, www.seattleaquarium.org.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com