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?
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.
That’s how I know them as well, around compost heaps these yellow and black beetles hover, and then you find those guys in the ground, but I am south African so that might be why I know them as cutworms
Interesting, cutworms seems to be a term used for various catipillar type larva, though none of the pictures I saw look to have the front 6 legs from my photo
Not a great photo in the Wikipedia link, I can see 1 leg sticking out only and looks a lot hairier.
Your photo looks very close to how I have seen them.
Looking up African Fruit Beetle grubs gets me this.
That is incredibly similar if not identical!
I’ll have to go back and dig some more. This guy was under dead leaves but ontop of the soil. Seemed to be a part of the yard that stays shaded throughout the day and retained some moisture.
Sounds about right, cutworm bait and some sort of sistemic poison works wonders, but make sure you take care of them