Question: how do water skaters walk on water if water is a liquid not solid?

Frank Longford answered on 11 Mar 2015:

Because of the strong surface tension water has and how the water skater spreads it’s weight over a wide area.

Molecules are attracted to each other, whether they are solids or liquids. Because the molecules in water are attracted quite strongly to each other, this creates a force that pulls all of them together and makes to more difficult for other molecules to get in between them, called the “surface tension”. The water skater has 6 long legs, which distributes it’s mass out over the surface of the water it’s sitting on, so the gravitational force that pushes the water skater onto the surface of water isn’t as strong. It’s the same reason that if we stand on a nail it will probably go into the ground, but standing on a flat metal sheet of the same mass wont do anything.

The strength of water’s surface tension is actually very unique in nature and its because of special bonds that water molecules can make between each other called “hydrogen bonds”. In fact, without these, there would be no life on earth because all the water would boil off into our atmosphere and then probably into space.