Todd Clerico, age 12, of Lancaster, Penn., for his question:

DOES THE MALE KANGAROO HAVE A POUCH, TOO?

Only the female kangaroo has a pouch where the baby spends the first months of life. A baby kangaroo is called a Joey.

Immediately after birth, a Joey uses its forepaws to crawl without assistance from its mother's birth canal up into her pouch. There it nurses on mother's milk. Like the babies of all marsupials, it is much less developed at birth than the young of most other kinds of mammals. The eyes, ears and even the hind legs of a newborn Joey are all underdeveloped.

Baby kangaroo spends the first six to eight months of its life in mother's pouch. Even though it will leave mother to explore the world when it is about six months old, it will continue to hop back into the pouch to feed or escape danger until it is about 10 months old.