The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I wear formal dress and have never once attended a wedding.
I am a bird that traded the sky for the sea.
One of my kind balances an egg on his feet for four months of darkness.
You will never find me anywhere near a polar bear.
I waddle across Antarctic ice.
Penguin
The tuxedo is camouflage: a white belly against the bright surface above, a black back against the dark water below.
Of the eighteen species, only two live on the Antarctic mainland; several are temperate and one lives at the equator, on the Galápagos. The emperor is the extreme case: it dives beyond five hundred metres, holds its breath for twenty minutes, and breeds in the coldest weather on Earth precisely because the chick must be independent before the summer sea ice breaks up. The tuxedo is countershading, the same camouflage used by sharks. And because seabirds cannot drink fresh water, a gland above each eye strips salt from the blood and drips concentrated brine out of the beak.
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 #8 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #7. Next: mystery #9. Or try #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #9.