Tom Schaffer, age 9, of Boise, Ida., for his question:

Do horsehairs really turn into snakes?

Maybe you live in the country where there are horses and other friendly farm animals. Then chances are you have heard the strange story of the horsehair snake. Perhaps you have tested the story to see if it is true. Many young peop1e have put  a hair from a horse's tail into a jar of water, hoping it wilt turn into a snake.  But it never does.

This long, stringy animal lives in creeks and ponds where we hardly notice him in the muddy water. But sometimes he gets into the trough of water where the horses drink. Then we do notice him we call him the hair snake or the horsehair snake.  Both names suit him, because the skinny fellow looks for all the world like a hair, perhaps two feet long  a coarse hair that might have come from the tail or mane of a horse.

Yesterday, perhaps, there were no hair snakes in the horse trough. Today there may be dozens of them. Naturally this makes us curious about where the stringy creatures cams from. And when people cannot so1ve a mystery, they tend to make up a fancy answer to explain it. Long ago someone invented an amazing story to explain the horsehair snake.

The story has been handed on, and most of us have heard it. It says that the Hair snake begins life when a horsehair falls into the drinking trough. With the help of the sun and the water, the hair turns into a living hair snake. You can test The story with a horsehair in a bottle of sunlit water. Never never never will the hair turn into a living snake.

The hair snake came from his parents, who were also hair snakes. His parents came from his grandparents, who were just like all the hair snakes who have ever lived. And the true life story of the hair snake is more amazing than the fanciful story. Most of the stringy fellow's life is spent inside the tummy of a cricket or a water beetle or a grasshopper. When he is fully grown, he leaves the insect and drops into the water. This is why we never see young hair snakes in the horse trough. Mrs. Hair snake lays strings of eggs in the water, and they hatch into millions of grubs. A few will be swallowed by insects. They will stay inside the insects until they are ready to live in the water.

All true snakes have bony skeletons with dozens of ribs. The hair snake is not a true snake, for he does not have one bone in his body. Some people call him a  hairworm, but he is not related to the pink Earthworm. Mr. Pinky has banded rings called segments around his body, and the hairworm has no segments. He is a very simple animal ca11ed a roundworm or a threadworm. In North America, we can find 15 different hairworms. Some are black, some are rusty red, and the big ones may be two feet long.