Kathy Schinner, age 11, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for her question

Do all octopuses lay eggs?

The octopus is full of fascinating surprises. There seems to be no reason to fabricate false tales to make him interesting. But people do. For example, one weird tale paints him as a vicious monster, lurking in the deep ocean while he gleefully plots human assassination. This horror tale is way out of character. Certainly a big octopus can cope with a deep sea diver. And if scared or tormented, naturally he does his mighty best to defend himself. But an octopus, even a giant one, tends to be a peaceful character who prefers hiding to fighting.

The large and small octopuses are mollusk animals. Their close cousins include the ten armed squids, the inky cuttlefish and the papery shelled nautilis. Other classes in the mollusk phylum are occupied by snails and slugs, oysters, mussels and other remote cousins. All the 80,000 known mollusks are soft bodied creatures, with or without protective shells. And all of them lay eggs with large yolks that hatch into miniature copies of their parents.

The 50 or so known species belong to the sea. The small types range in size from one inch to several. inches. As a rule, they live quiet lives in shallow, sunlit shore waters. A giant octopus has an arm spread 28 feet wide. He prefers a secret life in and around dark, underwater caverns of the deep ocean. When hungry, he swims or tippy toes forth to find some meaty food. True, he can and sometimes does use his eight mighty arms to defend himself. But his soft body has no protection against hungry foes and he tries to stay out of sight.

All the octopus relatives come in two sexes and the fertilized eggs require cells from the male and the female. The male produces a package of sperm cells in his neck funnel. He uses his third right arm to transfer this spermatophore into the mantle cavity of the female. An octopus cavity is a loose skin, with an opening around the neck. It expands and contracts to supply oxygen bearing water to the gills. In the female, it becomes a cozy cavity where the sperm cells are fertilized and the egg yolks are encased in gelatinous capsules.

The female lays the eggs through her mouth or her funnel. They look like pale bunches of grapes, left to hatch in the sea. Those that survive become small copies of their parents. Octopus parents have no interest in family life. This is odd because they are quite intelligent    and as a rule, nature's intelligent animals devote their best efforts to tending and educating their children.

Sometimes a large octopus is captured and displayed in an aquarium. There we can boggle at his most unusual shape and watch him moving around like a graceful dancer. We can see him change the color of his skin to match his moods. At feeding time we are astonished to see the weird looking monster greet his keeper politely    proving that he is at least halfway tame.