Sorry I accidentally deleted my last post. I appreciate the answers the two people gave.
This is some big larva I found and the head looks centipede-ish but the body is short and fat with less legs.
I went through my images and found an old photo of a beetle that was on my screen door. Maybe it’s a larva for one of these?
Where do you live geographically?
Looks like a cicada larvae.
Citation: I live in the South and it’s cicada season
That is the larvae of a some member of the Scarabaeoidea family.
Being German the first thing that comes to mind is the Cockchafer (Maikäfer).
The friend you have there looks like it could be a member of that family so it’s possible that’s the larva form. (But I’m no beetle expert)
Hopefully the Cock Chafer doesn’t get its name from its activity
Maybe this guy could actually be a girl? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucanus_cervus the female looks somewhat close and the larva looks similar.
possibly a cutworm—they are capable of devouring a huge amount of foliage in a very short time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_chafer
In Germany you’ll find tons of larvae from that beetle, which look like the one you posted . They are usually “benign”.
That looks like a cutworm to me, and if there’s one that big, there should be more, some shallow digging should bring out more. Any plants just randomly dying and falling over?
I had commented on the original post saying I called these cutworms as a kid.
I remember seeing them around the compost piles along with some yellow and brown/orange beetles.
Always assumed these cutworms turned into the beetles because they could be found inside these little hard mud pods and sometimes you’d find them in a larval state.
Just looked it up, yeah… fruit chafer beetle in South Africa ( a few different names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachnoda_sinuata) and they start off as these cutworms.
