Boris Shljarevski, age 11, of Souris, Manitoba, Canada, for his question:

In what animal group is the octopus?     

This question calls for a guessing game. Is the octopus related to a fish or a frog, a snail or a serpent? Take your pick. Perhaps the snail strikes you as an unlikely relative for an octopus. Nevertheless, the snail and the octopus are distant cousins.     

The leggy octopus is classified in the animal phylum Mollusca,~ along with more than 70,000 other animals. We all know. that clams and oysters, scallops and an assortment of beautiful shellfishes are mollusks. These creatures may lead us to suspect that the term "mollusk" may mean crusty or perhaps armor plated. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Mollusca is a scientific term coined from a Latin word for soft. All members of the clan are soft bodied creatures. Some wear protective clam type shells and some carry snail type shells on their backs. The octopus and his cousins are soft bodies mollusks with no crusty shells. Cousin cuttlefish has a sliver of bony crust buried in his soft tissues.   

 This and other evidence has led zoologists to suspect that octopus ancestors may have been shelled mollusks. The large phylum Mollusca includes a wide variety of unlikely looking relatives. Zoologists subdivide it into six classes. The clam and his classmates with double shells are bivalves. The snail and his countless cousins belong in a class called Gastropods.  This term is coined from older words meaning stomach and foot. A snail has one and only one foot on, of all places, the underside of his tummy.     The octopus and about 400 of his close relatives belong in the class Cephalopoda. This term means head foot, and it is somewhat misleading. Actually he has no real feet, and we may think of his twining tentacles as either arms or legs. Each tentacle tapers to a pointed end which may or may not be a sort of toe.     

The experts who named the class Cephalopods seem to have thought of the fleshy tentacles as feet, and to be sure, these appendages really are fixed right onto the very head of the cephalopod.     There are several outstanding differences among the 400 or so cephalopods, so the class is subdivided into several orders. The 10 legged squid is in the decapod group. The eight legged octopus is in the Octopoda order, along with about 50 cousins. The order is subdivided into smaller families and still smaller genera, and each octopus cousin has a special species name all his own.     

The smallest octopus measures an inch and the largest has an arm spread of 28 feet.  Each member of the group coldest weather or Tuesday, February 27, 1968 the days are growing shorter. Heat absorbed and stored from the long solstice days are added to the sunbeams from the August sun.     

The same seasonal lag carries over into the winter schedule. The earth retains some of its summer heat through the fall, but as it gets less solar radiation, it has less heat to share with the air. The shivering air grabs all the earthy warmth it can get. Day after day the accumulated stores of ground heat are depleted, and this continues past the winter solstice, even though the days are growing longer.     

The earth's reserve supplies of heat are lowest a month or two after the shortest day. Then the balance adjusts and next year's reserves begin to accumulate.     This seasonal lag is our general weather schedule. But the weather may decide to startle us with a frosty May morning or bury Christmas Day under the fiercest blizzard of the whole year. These surprises however, are local weather events in a much more general pattern. After the unusual event, the weather can be expected to return to its usual schedule.