The diet of the sloth bears consists mostly of social insects and fruits. These are

predominantly ground-living ants and termites that are common and found in large colonies, and

sugar-rich fruits of commonly occurring plants that produce large fruit crops (Laurie &

Seidensticker, 1977; Yoganand, unpublished data). Insects dominated the diet of sloth bears in

Chitwan, both during fruiting and non-fruiting seasons (Joshi et al., 1997). In Panna, however,

fruits dominated the diet, except during monsoons when they fed on more insects. From the two

studies (Garshelis et al., 1999), sloth bears appear to persist in much higher densities in Chitwan

than in Panna. The hard soil conditions in Panna may make feeding on termites nearly

impossible during the dry season and may explain why insectivory is curtailed during this

season. Since sloth bears in Panna show a preference for insects over fruits in the wet season, I

presume that the protein-rich insect dominated diet is preferred over a fruit-dominated diet,

which probably explains why sloth bears have smaller home ranges in Chitwan than in Panna.

 In relation to habitat type and rainfall characteristics, Nagarahole and Bandipur appear to

be more similar to Chitwan than to Panna. Accordingly, with the lack of information on sloth

bear home range sizes in Nagarahole and Bandipur National Parks, for this study, I considered 4

home range sizes, 10 km2, 18 km2, 25 km2 and 50 km2 as options for the analysis. The fourth

home range size, namely, 50 km2, was primarily used to study the behavior of the model and is a

home range size that may not be realistically expected to occur in Nagarahole or Bandipur

National Parks, at least not a home range size expected for a brief period of 15 continuous

sampling nights.

Constant r

 Territoriality has not been observed with sloth bears (Joshi et al., 1999; Laurie &

Seidensticker, 1977), hence each camera trap is likely to be within more than one sloth bear's