This makes no garden sense, does it?

I am about to harvest an eggplant from the plant on the left in the chicken wire. The picture, I took a month ago, shows how the plant in the chicken wire cage was ignored almost entirely by the nastiest of eggplant bushes, flee beetles. [image error]At the size of normal fleas the flea beetle would easily jump through the cage. But they did not. This bush was far ahead of the one on the right and the others in the garden. Was it the chicken wire? This makes no sense?