Twist Tie Water Strider - FunScience Scavenger Hunt)

Hi, I'm Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. We are back with another science scavenger hunt, and today we're going to be needing some twist ties, the kind that come on bread bags. Not this kind. Keep in mind we do not need these little tabs. We need the twist ties on bread bags, or sometimes you can find twist ties bundling up cables. You need two twist ties. Now the first thing we're going to need to do is take off the outer covering on these twist ties so we have a Now I find the best way to do this is to take a scissor, start at the end of the twist tie, and cut down along the wire. That's the wire I'm looking for. Now I need to get the rest of this off. This kind of twist tie is pretty simple. You want to get it started with the scissors closer to the end. All I'm doing is squeezing a little bit with the scissors and pulling on the twist tie. Take your time with this because once you get it started, it should just slide off, and now I have a nice clean wire. As you can see, I have my two cleaned off twist ties. Now what do we do? We're going to try and make our very own water strider here at home in my kitchen. Now water striders are cool insects found in nature, and they basically just sit on top of water. It's really cool to see. They look something like this. Here you can see that the water strider is sitting on top of the water surface. We're going to try and make our own water striders using these two twist ties, and then we'll talk about the science that we see at work. All right, to make our water striders, we're going to pretty much form an X with the two twist ties. I'm going to go up and I'm going to start wrapping them around each other, and I have the start of my water strider. Now I need to bend the legs so that it starts to look like a bug that's sitting down. I have legs bent, legs bent, and the tricky part is to get all the legs touching the surface at the same time. Now what this allows me to do is to swoop in here, get underneath the water strider, balance it, and place it on the water. Now you can see we have two water striders floating on the water, and the question is why? Why are these able to float on the water? Now to help you answer the question why these water striders are floating on the surface of the water, we're going to try to add something to our container of liquid. We're going to add some soap. Watch what happens when I put a drop of soap onto the water. Watch the wait for it. One dropped and the second one dropped. So our scavenger hunt for the day is why were these little wire water striders able to float on the surface of the water, and why did they sink after I added one drop of soap to our container of water? Hop online and see if you can find out the answer to this science scavenger hunt. If you think you know the answer, post it in the comments below. Don't forget to tell your friends and teachers about our science scavenger hunts here at Fun Science Demos. Science really is so cool, even when you're working with something as simple as a twist tie. Happy hunting!