Ant soap bubble

you can touch bubbles with out them bursting, so I guess an ant could.
Find an ant, make a bubble, put the ant on it. It might even work :D

 

I'm guessing it would be pretty difficult, but an ant could walk across a soap bubble. As mike mentioned, you can make significant sustained contact with a bubble without it bursting. To the ant it may be more like swimming though.

 

I'm fairly certain that the pull of gravity would move the ant downward, and the traction it could achieve would not be sufficient to counter that pull. It would be like trying to swim up a waterfall.

 

As Lurch observes, it wouldn't get much traction if it could walk. It would be more like swimming. Whether the ant will be suspened on the surface, be drawn-in, or pop the film depends upon the chemistry of it's legs and what it's been walking in.

One of http://www.bio.miami.edu/~cmallery/150/chemistry/c3x3waterbug.jpg" [Broken] should manage to sit on a soap membrane.

 

People are not considering the fact that soap bubbles have *two* interfaces; the soapy water is a thin film.

Given that the interfacial energy of pure water in air is about 70 dyn/cm (70 erg/cm^2), say the interfacial energy of soapy water about 10 dyn/cm.

An ant weighs about 3 mg, so each 'foot' has 0.5 mg spread over (say) 0.1 mm^2. 'g' ~ 1000 cm/s^2, so each foot exerts about 0.5 dyn/mm^2 (5*10^-3 dyn/cm^2) pressure.

The pressure jump across one interface of a 5 cm diameter soap bubble is 2* 10 dyn/cm * (2/2.5 cm) = 16*dyn/cm^2. This is much higher than the foot pressure of an ant, so the ant's weight should be supported by the bubble.

 

Check outside near the cracks of sidewalks or near the crevices of a patio

 

Put a piece of food on the ground and wait 30 minutes

 

Thanks, you taught me ants have 6 legs. I never reely noticed

 

Thanks for the update as this certainly is interesting.