Janet Rosenstern, age 8, of Arlington Heights, Ill., for her question:
What kind of fish is the argonaut?
The argonaut lived in the sea. But she is not really a fish. She has no scales and no fishy fins. She has a built in water pistol that she uses to squirt her way through the $ea. Her mouth is inside a ring of eight long, thin arms for the argonaut is a cousin of the long armed octopus.
Long; long ago, the peop1e of greece told the story of Jason who went seeking the magic golden fleece. His men were the argonauts and together they sailed over the mediterranean sea in the good ship argo. The little animal ca11ed the argonaut also sails over the mediterranean. To the people of Greece, her paper white sail looked like a little ship bobbing up and down on the blue waves. And like the famous argo ship of old, she also had a set of oars to row herself through the water. It seemed sensible to call this little sailor an argonaut.
The paper white sail of the argonaut looks like a delicate sea shell. Actually, it is a sea going baby carriage. It is made by the mother argonaut to carry her precious brood of eggs. The father argonaut never builds a papery sail to go scudding over the waves. He is a little fella about one inch long. He looks like a thimble made of tough jelly with a pair of bulging eyes. At the open end of the thimble is a little round mouth set inside a circle of eight long, thin fingers.
Mr. Argonaut looks like his big cousins, the squid and the cuttlefish, the octopus and the devilfish. And so does mrs. Argonaut except that she is ten times bigger than her husband. Her gristly body may measure eight or ten inches. The argonaut family has traveled by jet for millions of years. They have tubes that squirt like water pistols. They squirt and squirt and little jets of water jerk them through the sea.
When egg laying time comes around, mrs. Argonaut bends two of her long arms over her back. Over them she builds a shady, papery shell, all ridged with graceful grooves. She lays a grainy mass of little dark eggs, and manages to tuck most of them under the papery hood of the baby carriage. Then up she 90’s to the surface to take them sailing over the bouncing blue waves. If the wind is too lazy to blow her sail, she uses a few of her long arms as oars to row her sea going stroller over the sea.
The argonaut also is called the paper nautilus. She has several nautilus cousins that live under the deep waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans. One of them is the chambered nautilus that lives its life inside one of the loveliest shells in the sea. It is a snaily coil of little chambers, each one bigger than the next. The nautilus lives in the biggest room and pokes his many fingers through the door.