Mike Elrod, age 10, of Toccoa,, Ga., for his question:

What exactly i s metamorphosis?

Metamorphosis is one of Mother Nature's many miracles. You can watch it happen before your very eyes, especially at this time of year. One way is to find a cabbage patch and hunt for a green caterpillar. You are likely to find him munching away on a green leaf. He is a slow, stodgy fellow, too slow to travel very far. The most interesting thing in life to him is food, food, food. The cabbage leaf is his home, his pantry and his grocery store.

Break off a cabbage leaf and put it, with the caterpillar* into a glass jar. While you are among the cabbages, look around for some small, white eggs, a little bit larger than pin heads. Your green caterpillar hatched from an egg just like these.

For a few days, maybe a week, your captive caterpillar will eat and eat. Give him 6 fresh bit of cabbage leaf from time to time. Soon he will seen to get tired of all this eating. He will become lazy and lonly. Then, one day he will crawl under the shady part of his leaf and begin to change into a hard, green crysalis. He may stay this way for two weeks, or all winter. If you keep him fairly warm, he is apt to wake up sooner.

Try to be there when this great day arrives. The crusty, green coat will split open and out will struggle, not a stodgy old caterpillar, but a beautiful white butterfly. In one life time, this little fellow has changed from an egg to a crawly caterpillar to a sleepy crysalis to a winged butterfly. We call this miracle metamorphosis   a fine sounding word which means to change form. And certainly the form of a butterfly is just as different from the form of a caterpillar as it can be.  

Many insects go through this miracle of metamorphosis. Some remain in the egg or crysalis stage all winter and wake up to fly around only when summer brings sunny days. Other animals also go through metamorphosis,, though none change quite as much as the butterfly.

Frogs and toads go through metamorphosis. A frog begins life as a little black egg embedded in a gob of jelly. It floats in the water and hatches into a wriggly black tadpole. The tadpole has gills for breathing oxygen from the water and he cannot possibly live on the land. However, he soon gets over this fishy stage and swaps his gills for a pair of air breathing lungs* He is now a young frog, able to breathe air and come out onto the dry land. This kind of metamorphosis is nct so complete as that of the butterfly. But in the process, the little fellow did change from a fishy animal to a land animal.