But if he shows up today with a digital camera full of fresh photos of starfish, sea anemones, crabs, cucumbers and chitons, don’t be surprised.

The ebb tides that exposed more than 4 extra feet of South Sound beaches Wednesday were the lowest daytime tides of the year. And not just this year.

Marine ecologist Bonnie Becker, a University of Washington Tacoma assistant professor, said Wednesday’s noontime lows were expected to draw the Sound lower than any daylight tides have since June 1986. Daytime tides won’t drop this far again until June 2022, she said.

“It’s been close, but it hasn’t been quite this low,” Becker said Tuesday. “I have to work tomorrow, but I should play hooky and check it out.”

If you, like Becker, missed Wednesday’s opportunity to observe the life revealed at the extreme low end of the Sound’s intertidal zone, take heart. Today’s low tide – about 12:45 p.m. along Tacoma’s Commencement Bay – will touch the shore at points barely above the low marks set Wednesday. Actual amounts vary along the coastline.

In fact, tide tables through Sunday list below-average or minus tides.

“This is a very rare opportunity to look through a window you don’t ever get to see,” said biologist and teacher Alan Rammer.

“I personally have never been on this beach in a minus 4-foot tide,” he said Tuesday by cell phone from Saltwater State Park in Des Moines. This week’s low tides “are all new adventures for me,” he added.

For 22 years, Rammer, who works for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, has walked the shorelines with schoolchildren, helping them understand the significance of their discoveries.

“It’s like unwrapping a Christmas present: You don’t know what you’re going to uncover as the tide goes out,” he said.

On Tuesday, he guided 50 third-graders from Mountain View Elementary School in Edgewood. The most unusual find? A pregnant skeleton shrimp, which reminded Rammer of a space alien.

“The male is like a sea horse. He carries the babies,” he said.

Another boy found what Rammer described as a “ball of phlegm,” so off-putting that the child carried it inside a tiny sea shell because he didn’t want to touch it. “He saw dots all lined up in rows inside it, so he knew it was unusual,” said Rammer, who immediately identified the mucous ball as the egg case of a bubble snail.

Among other finds: a toadfish or midshipman fish, who, according to Rammer, had “staked out his territory” under a rock and was trying to find a mate. Also, three octopuses, red and about 3 inches long. And one baby sea cucumber.

“There are so many things down here that I think people walk right over,” Rammer said of the Saltwater park shoreline, which features three types of intertidal habitats: sandy, muddy and rocky.

Most plentiful at Saltwater on Tuesday were the egg cases of moon snails. Shaped like toilet-bowl plungers, with the texture of leather, they never fail to provoke questions, Rammer said, particularly from adults.

Often on his low-tide field trips, adult chaperones appear more awestruck than schoolchildren do, Rammer said. They’ve lived near the Sound all their lives, they tell him, and never realized the diversity of life in the intertidal zone.

“When you just pause and take a minute and look at what is beneath your feet, it is just amazing,” said Charlotte Spang, who coordinates the Seattle Aquarium’s 153 volunteer naturalists who walk King County’s beaches throughout the summer.

Like Rammer, the King County volunteers preach a conservation message and encourage beachgoers to leave the critters they encounter where they find them.

Representatives of a similar Gig Harbor-based volunteer group, called Harbor WildWatch, will be at Kopachuck and Penrose state parks during low tides this week.

Meanwhile, at the UW Tacoma, Becker is gearing up for her marine ecology class, a group of 10 seniors who will head out to Fox Island for a low-tide field trip Friday.

Yes, she expects to see moon snails and their egg masses or sand collars. But also giant barnacles – “maybe the size of your palm.”

Past trips also have yielded kelp crabs, nudibranches (a type of sea slug), orange cucumbers, and both ochre and sunflower sea stars, anchored by 15,000 tubular feet. These are the ones with as many as 24 arms, which measure as wide as 3 feet across.

“There are some big sunflower sea stars right under the bridge,” Becker said. “I shouldn’t tell you about our secret spot.”

Susan Gordon: 253-597-8756

see for yourself

Start your low-tide adventure anywhere you can get onto a Puget Sound beach – just avoid deep, sticky mud.

TACOMA AREA

Fox Island bridge: The beaches on either side of Hale Inlet offer a rocky environment to explore.

Kopachuck State Park: Located a few miles west of Gig Harbor. There are lots of sand dollars here, plus you can see plenty of crabs in the shallow, grassy areas as the tide goes out.

Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge: The refuge offers a chance to see some creatures unique to a river delta, such as sand worms and mud shrimp.

Penrose Point State Park: These protected beaches on the Key Peninsula offer a chance to see numerous shellfish.

Quartermaster Harbor: The beaches on Vashon Island are great for finding barnacles of all sizes.

Salters Point Beach: This Steilacoom beach, at First and Champion streets, is a great place for turning over rocks to see tiny crabs and fish. Beach access requires walking down stairs.

Sunnyside Beach Park: Located on Chambers Creek Road in Steilacoom, this is a rather long beach, so there’s plenty of room to explore.

ELSEWHERE

Burfoot Park and Priest Point Park, north of Olympia; Tolmie State Park on the Nisqually Reach north of Lacey; Frye Cove County Park on Eld Inlet; and Potlatch State Park on Hood Canal are good spots.

Jeffrey P. Mayor, The News Tribune