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controlling factors vary from one year to the next, the

quantity of food available to Wood Storks can be expected

to differ each nesting season. Because of the many complex

interactions, the food production of wet years following

dry years will differ from that of wet years following wet

years and the production of dry years following dry years

will differ from that of dry years following wet years.

For this reason, the temporal pattern of rainfall

distribution has cumulative importance, and biological

events of a given year should be considered not only in the

context of the climatological events of the current year

but also in the context of the climatological and

biological events of preceding years.

 Optimum conditions for prey fish production would seem

to have prevailed during the 1974 wet season, since marshes

such as Corkscrew were covered with water to near maximum

depths from late June through October (Figure 38), but

simulations from Model III (Figure 78), in which

coefficients were adjusted to fit 1974 data, suggest that

fish production measured at Corkscrew during the 1974 wet

season was very low compared to that of some previous

years. The simulations showed much higher concentrations

of fish in the 1969-71 period, which corresponds to the

period when Kushlan (1972) studied seasonal events at an

alligator hole in the Big Cypress. Fish concentrations at

the alligator hole (Kushlan, 1976) greatly exceeded those

measured during the dry-down at Mud Lake Pond in 1974-75.