Ralph Benko, age 9, of Albany, N.Y., for his  queston;

Can a turtle drown?

We share our world with countless animals and it is often fun to watch them as they go about their work or play. A stream of quiet pond is a good place to watch Mother Natures small creatures. If you stay very still, you may see insects dancing on the water. You may see the frogs do their champion diving and, if you are lucky, you may watch a little turtle swimming underwater or dozing on a sunny stone.

Turtles are reptiles. Their distant cousins are the snakes, the lizards and the crocodiles. All reptiles have lungs for breathing oxygen from the air. All of the many turtles have air breathing lungs as we do, though some of them spend almost all of their lives in the water.

A turtle has a pair of nostrils at the very tip of his nose. When he comes up for a breath of air, only a small part of his nose pokes out of the water. Unless you are watching closely, you are not likely to notice him, for he makes hardly a ripple.

The lungs of a turtle are, of course, inside his soft body which is firmly encased in his shell. The shell is both a house and a coat of armor, As a rule, the turtle's backbone and ribs are fastened to the inside of his shell. This makes him rather stiff, for he cannot bend and twist. He cannot use his ribs, as we do, to pull the air into and push it out of his lungs. His chest cannot move up and down as ha breathes.

The turtle makes up for this stiffness with two sets of strong muscles inside his body. There are muscles in his sides which makes the lungs stretch out to let in a breath of air. Another set of muscles in the tail end of the turtle push up and squeeze the lungs when time comes to let out a breath of air.

The little fellow you find in a pond or stream is a fresh water turtle, But he must come to the service to breathe or he will drown. In the ocean there are huge turtles eight feet long and they too have air breathing lungs. Some of these whoppers also have gills for taking oxygen from the water. They can stay under water a long time without drowning, but even these big turtles with gills must come up once in a while to fill their lungs with air.

The turtles can trace their family tree back for some 200 million years. There were turtles before there were birds or snakes and long before the furry mammals came to live in the world. Turtles are too slow to run away but they all wear shells of armor to protect them from their enemies.