Robert Lidstone, age 8, of Galveston, Texas, for his question:

Where do piranha fish live?

The piranha fishes are greedy gangsters and bad, bad bandits of the fish world. They are at home in certain streams of South America. The streams they like best are warm, rather lazy and rather muddy. They live from northern Argentina as far north as Venezuela. They can be found in Brazil and Paraguay, in Uruguay and the Guiana countries. Most of their favorite streams drain into the Orinoco or the Amazon rivers. But, thank goodness, the piranhas do not infest all the streams in these countries.

The piranha is a flat round fish, about ten inches long. For his size, he is the fiercest of all fishes. And the carnivorous creatures always gangs up with a mob of his fierce, cruel relatives. If a:, pig comes down to drink, they snap their bulldog jaws and grab off bites in the scissor sharp teeth. In ten minutes, they can strip the poor pig down to his bare bones. These deadly piranhas certainly are not pets and should not be sold in pet stores. For one thing, they devour other fishes and yearn to bite off human fingers. For another thing, they may escape and fill our streams with gangs of greedy killers