This week on the Naked Scientists Radio Show and Podcast we've gone animal mad – or should that really be animal sane?! We're looking at the behaviour of animals and getting excited about all the smart things they do. We've got a whole host of experts to explain the intelligence behind the behaviour and describe the latest findings in the field (quite literally in this case!).

On the show we'll have Prof Nicky Clayton from the University of Cambridge explaining how clever birds learn from their mistakes. We'll also have Dr Andrew Smith from Anglia Ruskin University and Operation Wallacea telling us about the decision making process of monkeys.

Don't get your lunch stolen

Nicky's research focuses on psychological behaviour, her latest bit of work has looked at scrub jays which as it turns out are pretty smart birds.  Western scrub jays like to have their cake and eat it later; they often hide their food and go back for it later.  Nicky recently published some research showing that they remember who is watching them when they hide their food and adapt their caching behaviour accordingly.  This means that they can stop another bird stealing their food.  This is really exciting stuff because other than humans very few animals can actually plan ahead on the basis of past experience.  These Jays effectively trick each other because they know which individual was watching them and so can re-hide their food, it seems they do this regardless of whether they think the bird which was watching them showed any particular interest or not.  Prof Clayton and the scrub jays can be seen in the photo. 

Monkeying around

Andrew's research involves tamarins (small South American monkeys) and macaques (larger primates from Asia).  His work mainly covers the following: colour vision, ecology, nutrition and conservation.  Much of his work has been with two species of tamarins - saddleback and moustached, they live in mixed-species groups with one another in the Amazon rainforest.  By living together they may be able to benefit from combining their abilities to detect predators at different levels in the forest.  Andrew's reaserch has examined the ways in which they split the available resources and avoid competition. This allows them to associate with each other, and gain from that association.

To eat or not to eat?

How does a primate know when a fruit is ready?  It seems they know its ripe for the picking by its colour.  Andrew is interested in why primates are some of the only mammals to have good, three-cone, colour vision.  Most mammals see the world in a reduced set of colours compared to ourselves, but good colour vision may help primates to find the ripe fruits in leafy trees that they rely upon for food.  It is likely that the importance of fruit in the diet of our ancestors explains why we see the world in the colours that we do.  He's also looked at when tamarin monkeys feed on different things and found that they eat gum in the afternoons.  This is probably linked to the way in which gum is digested.  Such knowledge may be useful when keeping them and other primates in captivity.

40 winks – blink and you might miss they ever existed

Andrew has also looked at when and where monkeys sleep. The answer is governed by their predators.  Other factors such as the distribution of fruit trees and weather may influence their sleeping habits to a certain degree, but predators are the main pressure.  His work with macaques has centred around the endangered Buton macaques.  They are now restricted to just one island, Buton, off south East Sulawesi in Indonesia.  Logging and the resultant loss of habitat has already caused them to become extinct on Muna - the only other island where they were previously found. Andrew has been leading work to find out how many remain in one of the two large tracts of protected forest on Buton, with a World Bank project that aims to ensure the sustainable management of the forest.

To find out more about the world of meerkats, scrub jays and monkeys and who is trying to steal whose lunch, offspring or habitat you'll need to tune in to the show!