Tobin Hinton, age 7, of WestvVancouver, B. C., Canada, for his question:

What does  a seahorse eat?

This stately little creature belongs to the sea, and the sea provides all the things he needs to stay alive and healthy. He needs streams of salty sea water, flowing around him. He needs lots of floating seaweed. The seaweeds hide him from his hungry enemies. And while he is hidden, he hunts for his own food.

Seahorses live where the warm water has dust the right mixture of salty chemicals. He shares his sunny seas with lots of larger fishes and many, many other creatures that are much smaller than he is. He looks like a miniature horse, though he has no legs or flowing mane. So you might expect him to live on a horsey diet of vegetable food. Perhaps he eats the seaweeds, where he spends most of his time. Not at all., The seahorse refuses to eat greenery or vegetables of any kind.

The little fellow is a meat eater and his snacks are almost too small for your eyes to see. He shares his watery world with lots of tiny creatures called crustaceans. They are midget cousins of the lobsters and the crusty crabs. You may meet some of them on the beach, in the sand or at the water's edge. We call them sand fleas that belong in the world of insects.

Even these tiny crustaceans have crusty coats. So you would expect the seahorse to have strong teeth to chomp them. But actually he has no teeth at all. All he has is a small round mouth at the end of his long, horsey nose. He hunts for crusty snacks among the seaweeds, and swallows them whole, one by one. Somtimes he catches himself a,tiny baby crab or lobster, newly hatched from its egg.

His watery world teems with the tiny crustaceans he likes to eat. They cling to the seaweeds and float through the water. There is always plenty of his favorite food right where he can reach it. This is lucky, because the seahorse cannot gallop around to catch his dinner. Most of the time he twines his graceful tail around the seaweed and grabs a snack as it swims by.

Larger fishes fan their fans and swish their tails to swim through the water. The seahorse glides very slowly along with his tail coiled under his chest. He seems to swim without moving any part of his body at all. Actually he uses tiny fins that are almost as clear as the water. They are hard to see because he fans them to and fro about 35 times a second: But he cannot glide fast enough to chase his dinner.

There are about 50 different seahorses. All of them are at home in warm, sunny seas where the water is not very deep. Most of them are a little longer than a 7 year olds fingers. The midget of the family measures about two inches. He has a giant cousin who may grow to be 12 inches long.