Peggy Burns, age 10, of Jackson, Miss., for her question:

How do earthworms have babies?

If you want to raise rabbits, you start off with a pair of Mr, and Mrs. One of them must be a male and one of them must be a female or there will be no babies. If you want to raise earthworms, this problem does not arise. You can start off with any two worms in the world. They do not have to be male and female. In fact, you could not possibly tell which is which. For, strange to say, every earthworm is both a male and a female  both a father and a mother.

Two worms pair off, then each one crawls away to its solitary life. In time, each of the worms will lay a batch of eggs. Each mother is the father of the eggs laid by the other worm. You might suppose that this leads to a confused family life. Not at all the eggs are deserted to take their chances and the babies grow up without any help from their parents. There may be a million earthworms in an acre of good soil, but not one of them knows its mother, its father or its step brothers/sisters.

Each parent worm has a swollen garter around its body near the head end. This area is called the saddle. It forms a case of soft skin into which the eggs are laid. As the eggs develop, the egg case leaves the saddle and moves forward along the worms smooth round body. After about two weeks, the egg case slips clear of the worms head. It snaps shut, holding the eggs safely in a little brown bag about the size of a grain of wheat. The parent worm takes no more interest in its offspring. It crawls away to hide in its burrow or to search for some moldy leaves.

In another two weeks, the little eggs are about ready to hatch. The tiny babies are so small that you would never notice them crawling around in the moist and moldy ground. It takes six or seven of them, stretched out straight in a row, to reach from the tip of your thumb nail to the first joint.    ,~

The little pinkies crawl off in different directions, each searching for the mold which clingy to damp and decaying leaves. Not far away, another batch of worms has hatched. Their mother is the father of our little worms and the mother of ours is their father.

Many of the baby worms are devoured by birds, insects and other meat hungry animals. Those that survive soon learn to dig safe burrows in the ground. They do this by eating the soil, which goes in one end of the wormy body and comes out at the other end. If all goes well, the youngsters grow up in about two years. Each worm will then become both a mother and a father.