Wisconsin insect from Hell ?? What is it ?

Me and a round of my buddies do a yearly camping trip- this year it was to some indian lands up in northern Wisconsin. Well at night time little did we know we would be hijacked by some really fucked up looking critters.
These large looking centipede things with the heads of ants would come out of the ground really fast and haul ass straight to our fire. I mean these things were fast- they would be able to cover a good foot of ground in about 3 seconds.
They went to our fire and burrowed right under the hot rocks surrounding the flame. We threw a couple in the fire and those suckers crawled right out, lol. Even the next day we threw up a couple of the rocks and threw them in the hot ash. Nope, they just crawled right out. Obviously these pics are of one that well, was in my garage for a few days so he's shrunk down to about 3/4 of his original size but im sure someone can tell me what it is as i've looked and couldn't find anything about this monster bug. They were strong as hell to boot, easily holding themselves by the front mandibles and actually had two smaller mandible like hooks on their asses they could also hold themselves up with.







...size comparison

 

WTF you got there!??

 

Looks like a hellgrammite to me, I think they are larve stage of dragonflys.

 

Looks like an ant had a three way with one of those earwig things and a scorpion...

 

x2, but they are the larvae of the dobson fly

 

its a hellgrammite which is the larve stage of a dobson fly. So if you think the hellgrammite is nasty think of that thing with wings thats the dobson fly. On a side note they make awesome bass bait.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobsonfly

 

DING DING on the hellgrammite. They are a larval state, not of dragonflys, but of the Dobsonfly. They can bite, but are harmless. Fishermen love them (as do fish). Here's a dobsonfly .. yowza! Bet Chris4x4 would shit his liver if one of those landed on his neck.



LOL I see I was just beat to the punch by Nomad

 

lol, holy crap. Thanks guys ! It was driving me and my buddies nuts as to what it was. We've never seen anything that could trot around and in a fire like that without immediatley dying. Freaked one of my friends out the first night when 50+ starting popping out of the ground and making a run for the fire !

 

yup. Hellgramite. We use em for trout bait here in SC.

 

That is primo bass bait here in Pa you can smack them all day with hellgrammites!

 

Thank-you for giving me a reason to shit myself.

 

and you typically get a few fish on one piece of bait cause they are tough mothers.

 

Thats about all I can say about that . . . .

 

Kinda shocks me that ppl dont know what that is.

You get them right when they turn yellow. AWESOME bass bait then. Bass love them, but catch them at the right time of year when they are on the bank under rocks turning yellow. Then you got yourself a winner. They are super soft then though, so you gotta be careful hooking them.

 

Sorry, we don't have death bugs up here.

 

Yeah we don't have anything like that here in San Diego. I can't say I'm too curious to find out if I'm wrong. That fly looks quite scary.

 

And I though Az had some crazy shit...

 

Those look like they would catch the fish for you, maybe even eat part of the fish before you got it in the boat.

 

We've bought those at the bait store, but they were never that big, usually an inch or so... They must get pretty big...

 

that is all...