Linda Blevins, age 12, of Philadelphia, Penna., for her question:

Does the male seahorse really bear the young?

Mrs. Seahorse lays the eggs, but she puts them into a pouch on 'Mr. Seahorse’s tummy. There they nestles cozily sealed from harm, until the babies are ready to cope with their watery world. Then'. one by one, they wriggle out of fathers brood pouch and, while this is going on, _ it looks for all the world as though ho were giving birth to a litter of midget ponies.

The seahorse is a creature of shallow, warm weedy waters. One variety gets as far north as Cape Cod, but not in great numbers. He is the Western Atlantic seahorse, usually about four inches long though specimens of seven and a half inches have been found. A small variety, two inches long, lives off the shores of Florida. A whopping variety often a foot longs lives off southern California as far south as Peru. Almost 50 other kinds of seahorse live in various warm shallow waters of the world.

The body of a seahorse is encased in jointed armor, though he also has an internal skeleton. Half of his body is prehensile tail, able to grasp and wind around seaweeds and branches of coral. His horsy snout ends in a tiny round mouth. His favorite food is small sea crustaceans which is strange, considering he has no teeth to chomp their crunchy shells. He swallows them whole, shells and all.

The graceful little fellow seems to glide through the water with stately elegance. Actually, he is not gliding at all, but swimming with all his might. He swims by fanning small gauzy fins, perhaps at the rate of 35 vibrations a second. The fins are so small that, even vibrating at this spend, they can move his body only very, very slowly through the water.

The Western Atlantic seahorses do their courting in spring or early summer. Mrs. Seahorse grows an ovipositor, a tube with which she can Deposit her eggs into Papa's brood pouch. When the eggs are properly placed, perhaps 200 of them, off goes Mamma on her merry way with no family cares on her mind at all.

The brood pouch is sealed and the eggs are incubated for 45 days. Safely inside, they are supplied with oxygen and perhaps with food from the lining of the pouch. When the incubation period is over, the youngsters seem in no hurry to leave their cozy nest. In fact, Papa goes to a lot of trouble to roust them out. He wriggles and writhes pushes his swollen tummy against a rock or coral branch and seems to be trying to turn himself inside out.

Finally the your youngsters, each about three eights of an inch long, wriggle forth into the water. From here in they are on their own. Each knows from the first day of life how to hunt tiny crustaceans and how to hide and shelter in the weedy water.