 Proctor hypothesised that the vibrations the trembling male legs made were done to mimic the vibrations that females detect from swimming prey - this would trigger the female's prey-detection response causing females to orient and then clutch at males, mediating courtship.If this was true and males were exploiting female predation responses, then hungry females should be more receptive to male trembling - Proctor found that unfed captive females did orient and clutch at males significantly more than fed captive females did, consistent with the sensory exploitation hypothesis.Further evidence for the sensory exploitation hypothesis resulted from a cladistic analysis comparing 28 characters between other water mites of the family Unionicolidae and identified the most likely evolutionary scenario (the fewest reversal of character states and the fewer parallel evolution of character states (homoplasies)) for the origin of both the trembling behaviour and the 'net stance'.