Chance meetings happen all the time in society, and they happen out in the wilderness, too. Sometimes those meetings (especially in the wild) can be disastrous for one animal or the other, but other times they are just momentary encounters. I happened to observe one such meeting one afternoon last spring while I was photographing the passion fruit vines. A Florida carpenter ant happened to be crawling along the top of a stem while a gulf fritillary caterpillar was crawling along the bottom. I’m sure that both were looking for food. The ants love nectar while the caterpillars feed on the leaves. In this particular meeting the ant seemed curious, while the caterpillar continued on it’s way, completely oblivious to the ant as far as I could tell. The photos here show the two meeting and the ant turning it’s head to look at the caterpillar. I did a couple a couple of things differently in the post processing of these two images. Let me know which one you like better.

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