HOW CAN SPIDERS WALK ON WATER?

Why can spiders walk on water and we can't? To answer this question, you have to understand a few major ideas. Surface Tension Surface tension is the tendency for the surface of a liquid to act like a stretched membrane or piece of rubber. The cohesive forces work to bring the molecules on the interior of the liquid to the exterior surface. If you want to get scientific, surface tension is numerically equal to the force acting at right angles to a line of unit length that is lying on the surface and is called Constant of Capillarity and is represented by the symbol T. Capillarity is the interaction between contacting surfaces of a liquid and a solid that distorts the liquid surface from a planar, flat or two-dimensional, shape to concave or convex. Cohesion Cohesion is the attraction of molecules by which the elements of the body are held together. Water has the highest cohesive force of any liquid except that of mercury. At the air-water interface, the water molecules are H-bonded ...  more