【Watch Weekend Sexcapades (2014)】

Primates are Watch Weekend Sexcapades (2014)our closest living biological relatives. So perhaps it's time to show a little hospitality and stop destroying their homes.

About 60 percent of the world's monkeys, apes, tarsiers, lemurs and other primates are now threatened with extinction because of widespread agricultural and logging operations that are destroying forest habitats at a rapid clip, scientists found.

Of the world's 504 primate species, roughly 75 percent already have declining populations, according to a study published this week in the journal Science Advances.

CARD ID: 151590

"This truly is the eleventh hour for many of these creatures," Paul Garber, an anthropology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. Garber co-led the study with Alejandro Estrada of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

CARD ID: 151489

The assessment joins a string of recent reports that predict a dire future for the world's animals if we don't rein in aggressive land-use practices and crack down on poaching and animal trafficking.

A December analysis found that cheetahs are racing to the edge of extinction, with only 7,100 of the lighting fast creatures in the wild. Also last month, a group of conservationists and governments put giraffes on the official watch list of globally threatened and endangered species.

In mid-January, the outgoing Obama administration increased protection of the rusty-patched bumblebee. The species' population has plunged by nearly 90 percent since the late 1990s.

Many of these species share the same overarching threat: Habitat loss.

Forests around the world are being cleared to make way for soy beans, African palms, rubber trees and beef cattle. Illegal timber production is destroying vast swaths of tropical trees. These practices often happen in impoverished communities, where the forests offer a vital source of income. But agricultural producers drive much of the wide-scale destruction.

Agricultural growth claimed 1.5 million square kilometers, or 580,000 square miles, of primate habitats between 1990 and 2010, Garber and his colleagues found. That's about the size of Texas, California and Montana combined.

In Indonesia, one of the biggest homes to primate species, farmers are burning and draining swamp forests to bolster the nation's palm oil production.

CARD ID: 151608

The island's Sumatran orangutan, for instance, lost 60 percent of its habitat between 1985 and 2007, researchers found.

Elsewhere in the world, just a few thousand individuals remain of certain primate species, such as the ring-tailed lemur, Udzunga red colobus monkey, Yunnan snub-nosed monkey and Grauer's gorilla. In China, fewer than 30 individuals from the Hainin gibbon ape species remain.

Still, the authors of the new primate study attempted to end on a note of optimism.

If communities and governments can create more protected areas and find better, more sustainable ways for people to earn a living, then habitat loss could slow or even reverse, they said.

"Despite the impending extinction facing many of the world's primates, we remain adamant that primate conservation is not yet a lost cause," the researchers wrote.

Local conservation efforts are already paying off in parts of Central Africa.

Populations of mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are slowly recovering after suffering steep declines in recent decades, said Charlene Jendry, who co-founded the Partners in Conservation gorilla program at the Columbus Zoo & Aquarium in Ohio.

The program funds initiatives in Rwanda to help people earn money without destroying the forest. One effort, for instance, focuses on beekeeping.

Residents in the past raised bees inside Rwanda's Nyungwe National Park, and then burned down brush to calm the bees when it was time to collect honey, sparking forest fires. Partners in Conservation now works with some 1,300 beekeepers to construct modern beehives just outside the park and build sheds for honey storage and indoor apiaries.

"People are making more money, there’s 50 percent money honey collected, and there haven’t been any forest fires started by men and women there," Jendry told Mashable.

CARD ID: 151597