Lai ho'a is the name given, chiefly among the Lio of central Flores and their Nage and Keo neighbours, to a hairy, roughly man-sized being said still to live in remote forest and to avoid all human contact. Accounts describe an upright, tailless, ape-like creature that walks like a person, feeds on wild plants and small animals, and is seen only in passing. It belongs to the same order of imagination as the exterminated ebu gogo but, unlike them, is spoken of as a surviving presence rather than a vanished race. Ethnographers have weighed the figure both as a category of local folk zoology and as a candidate for an undocumented or relict hominoid persisting in the island's interior.