The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
My thread is stronger than steel of the same weight, and nobody has managed to manufacture it properly.
I have to liquefy my dinner before I can eat it.
I am not an insect, and the leg count gives it away.
Some of us cross hundreds of kilometres by letting the wind take a single thread.
Eight legs and a web.
Spider
Some species ride electrostatic threads, lifting off on the atmosphere's own charge. It is flight without wings, and it has carried them far out to sea.
Dragline silk outperforms steel of the same weight in tensile strength and absorbs far more energy before breaking, and nobody has managed to mass-produce it, because spiders are territorial and cannibalistic and refuse to be farmed. They cannot chew, so digestion happens outside the body: enzymes are injected, and the liquefied prey is drawn back in. The strangest habit is ballooning. Spiderlings release threads that pick up the atmosphere's electric field and lift them, sometimes to several kilometres of altitude and hundreds of kilometres out to sea — Darwin recorded them landing on the Beagle far from shore.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #47 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #46. Next: mystery #48. Or try #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11.