Dennis Silcox, age 14, of Newport News, Va., for his question:

How does a squid eat?

The smallest squids are just a few inches long. They dart like speeding arrows through the surface waters of the Seas. The biggest squids haunt the deep ocean 1500 feet or more beneath the waves. But all these odd members of the mollusk clan are carnivores. They hunt their own meat and devour their victims alive.
The giant squid has a fleshy head and body, perhaps 20 feet long. They are joined by a neck which is circled with a collar of loose skin. His huge, round, unblinking eyes are very startling, but his mouth is not noticeab1e. It is surrounded and hidden by a ring of 10 arms. One pair may be 35 feet long, but the others are shorter. All 10 arms are tentacles, fitted with round suckers.
If you saw the mouth of a squid, you might mistake it for an upside down parrot beak. The 1ower section is larger, and it hooks up and over the upper section. This horny bill may be five inches long, but it is not a true beak. The squid's mouth is a circular lip, and the hooked beak is actually his upper and lower jaw.
The swarms of smaller squid, many of them less than a foot long, are miniature copies of their giant cousins. Every squid, large or small, is a swift hunter, always on the prowl for live food. He dines on fish, bones and all, on crusty lobsters and sturdy shelled oysters. The amazing fellow swims by jet propulsion, and he darts through the water like a speeding arrow.
When hunting, he travels with his long arms bunched together until he Selects his victim. Then he squirts a jet of water to send him forward with a sudden jerk. His arms spread apart, and the long pair of tentacles grabs the struggling fish. The shorter tentacles push the trapped animal toward his mouth. The horny beak chumps off bite sized morsels.
The squid has a special tongue called a radula which he can use to grate his food into smaller pieces. He has no teeth, but the radula is crossed trith gritty ridges. As a rule, however, the hungry fellow swallows each gulp whole, bones, shells and all. The food goes down his throat to his stomach, where it is digested.
Schools of small squids hunt together, speeding through the water like swarms of pocket sized rockets. As a rule, a squid swims backward, for his syphon opens through a hole under his chin. The syphon is a bag of skin which the squid can fill with sea water. He has sets of muscles to empty his syphon with a squirt. The squirt of water is the jet propulsion which sends the streamlined squid on his way. He may bend his syphon around and squirt a jet of water to send himself forward., or he can swim forward by waving his fleshy fins, but he prefers to swim backward, facing where he has been.