Meet Portia, she’s a spider with superpowers (yes, you read that correctly)

For starters, she's a genius

Portia, as well as having a cool name (like a teacher who at the end of the film turns out not to be that bad after all), is a spider (more specifically, a type of spider with 17 different subtypes) with 3 superpowers that neither you, nor me, nor anyone you know has any hope of ever possessing. 

1) She can do record-breaking jumps

Remember parkour? That’s right, those guys jumping and somersaulting around the city, which we’re all very tired of to the point of not being impressed any more. Well Portia can jump 50 times the length of her body. Basically, she makes freerunners look like toddlers at a nursery, without blinking an eyelid. Of course she doesn’t actually have eyelids to blink with, but you get my point.

2) She has super vision

It matters very little whether you eat carrots till you’re orange, you’ll never have vision like Portia. To start with, she has eight pairs of eyes, which allow her to see 360 degrees around her. She also uses a complex visual system which makes use of a multi-layered retina. Some layers receive focused images and others images that are out of focus. This difference is what allows her to calculate the distance to her prey.

3) She’s a genius

You probably think you’re smart just because you reached the second room of an ‘escape room’ adventure with your mates from work. But Portia, singlehandedly, has more strategy than an entire methamphetamine-induced World War II platoon. She feeds on other spiders that are three times her size, for which her brain has to go into overdrive. As is explained in the BBC video below, Portia is capable of creating a 3D map of her surroundings and drawing up the most complex attack plans, whether lowering herself stealthily down onto her victims or pretending to be a prey to attract other spiders.