Kevin Richard Wadleigh, age 8, of Miami, Oklahoma, for his question:

What is the life story of the paddlefish?

The paddlefish is an amazing fellow to behold    just about the most unusual fish in our fresh water streams. In the past, lots of his relatives swam in many of our rivers. Nowadays, the paddlefish is hard to find. And so are the secrets of his life story.

In Oklahoma, the Arkansas River and its streams have been tamed by dams and re¬servoirs and man made lakes. In the northeast corner of the state, the people expect a number of weird looking paddlefish to come swimming along the Neosho River in the early spring. The river flows southward, spreads out into Fort Gibson Reservoir and spills over Fort Gibson Dam on its way to join the Arkansas. This waterwaylpis one small part in the vast river system of the Mississippi Valley. It happens to be the place where experts have learned most of what we know about the paddlefish.

Visiting fishermen are astounded when they happen to haul up a paddlefish. A big fellow may weigh 50 or 60 pounds. He may be over three feet long, but one foot of his length is a flat snout about two inches wide. The snout reminds some people of a paddle, which is how the paddlefish got his name. The folks by the Neosho River call him a spoonbill. By the time he gets to be this size, the big catch is a grown fish seven or eight years old.

For a long time, experts did not know where the baby paddlefish were born or what they looked like. The youngsters were discovered in 1939, but the little fel¬lows did not look at all like their parents. They were less than a quarter of an inch long and you could see clear through their pale, glassy bodies. They had tiny teeth but no paddle shaped snouts, though there were small bumps on their noses.

Experts watched some of the baby paddlefish as they grew. In Fort Gibson Reservoir  one batch grew 28 inches long in a year. Another batch took two years to grow from  18 inches to 30 inches. Some were only 32 inches long after three years. The  young ones soon begin to grow their long noses and also lose their teeth. They have  no    fishy scales and all of them swim along with their monstrous mouths wide open,  gulping great gobs of water. Inside their mouths, they have rows of little rakers  that strain out shrimps and water bugs and floating weeds.  The water is swooshed  out through the gills in the sides of their heads. The sifted food goes down into  the stomach.

At the age of seven or eight, a three foot paddlefish is ready to hand on life to the next generation. The greenish black eggs are left in a tumbling stream, far from the big waterways. There they hatch among the sands and gravels at the bottom. In the past, many paddlefish lived longer and grew bigger. One we know of reached 160 pounds. Most get caught or perish in the man made waterways before they become ten years old.

The paddlefish family history goes back 300 million years. His ancestors were among the first ray finned fishes. But his family has never had fishy type bones. His skeleton is made of gristly cartilage. His peculiar paddle is really an over¬developed upper lip. It is very fragile and experts are not sure why he has it. Some say he uses it to sense tasty morsels of food in the water. People once thought that he used it to shovel up food from the bottom. But most experts now say that this is not so.