Reptile & Amphibian Forums

to all of you who have cresteds, do you notice if your geckos preffer to eat in their trees above the ground or on the ground/substrate? i have a contraption set up so that they can eat in their trees but they continue not to touch the crested gecko diet food and they continue to get thinner! i have been feeding them for the past two weeks avery 2-3 days because i am worried. anyhow i thought maybe they only eat on the ground or something weird. i have three new babies that are in critter keepers and they eat great! i am just very worried because of the durastic weight loss. they came from a new home and stopped eating. if this continues for another week or two i will probably take them to get a fecal sample. i just worry that with the hand feeding and then the long drive to the vets may just stress them out even more. anyhow any advice would be great!

How old are they that aren't eating? How different of a set up do you have them in now vs where they were before? Temps/hum/everything else ok? Are they together now when they weren't before? Lots of things can cause them stress and loss of appetite.

IMHO cresties will eat where ever, but that being said, we prefer to feed them from a shallow dish (the kind sold as soy sauce bowls for sushi) on the floor. Are they used to CGD? Many cresties do no readily eat CGD until they've been hand fed it or had it mixed with strong smelling organic fruit baby food to draw them in. If your CGD is old, (too old should > 6 months be thrown away and bought fresh of course) it may not smell as much as fresh. (We've noticed this ourselves.) CGD should be offered everyday to encourage eating... I know our gecko loves to get up and drink her "coffee" (a couple of licks of CGD) right as the light goes off. Then she runs around a bit and settles in to eat the rest of the bowl of diet. It is not too much trouble to put a bowl on the ground, you know.

Are you offering them prey of some sort as well? Our geckos loves crickets, always has, and in a situation where they aren't eating well, extra protein will do them good.

All that being said, it never hurts to get a checkup, especially if your set up is on the mark and they've been together the whole time.
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0.1 Albino Leo Gecko
0.1 Crested Gecko
1.0 Dear Boyfriend
Departed: Harvey and Spock

the cage that they lived in b4 was a large long cage but everything was dead, there was no water, and you couldnt see through the glass because there was poop everywhere. the guy gave them to me becuase he knows i have several leos and fat tails so he was hoping i could take better care of them being he no longer had time. he didnt even know how many there were because they had been breeding. there are two that are bigger then all the rest, a male and female. i am assuming they are the parrents to the rest. they are at least two years old and possibly more because i remember two years ago they were full grown! anyhow they were neglected for a long time and there ended up being 4males and 2 females. i seperated the males from the females. the females are together in one cage and the males are 2 in two cages with 2 in each cage. the females are eating fine but the males dont seem to. they do have crickets and food all the time and im pretty sure the temps and so forth are are fine. i just took these picks of their cages. anyhow i dont know if you can see it

in the right corner on the first pick you can see the food dish. each cage has a simmilar feeding area where they can perch themselves and lap up their food. i cant think of anything else. i suppose i will get the babyfood out tonight instead of cgd. my babies dont seem to like their cgd either but they sure love their crickets and always have little pudgy bellies.

First suggestion, as I stated before, would be the completely easy and cost free solution: move the food to the floor. There is nothing that says a crestie HAS to eat from a perch, in fact, you may not have a proper perch set up as who knows how to make a bowl look like a piece of hanging fruit, right? Do you have water in there somewhere, I don't see a water bowl at all? Move the water bowl down to the floor too. Try some organic babyfood like banana's or apricots, these flavors seem to be foolproof.

Secondly, you have to separate all the males and consider separating the females as well, 2 males in one cage (which I believe you said) will not work. Cresties are much more aggressive than even leos to each other and people have posted here that aggression among females is very common.

Again, also realize that if they were that badly mistreated, a trip to the vet is not without reason. Any slip in the care or feeding can stress these guys out and make them susceptible to illness. Also you changed the dimensions of the "world", this is also stressful. Also double check your temps, cresties have a very narrow range and will become very stressed if outside of that range. Provide hides for them as well, I didn't see any in the pictures. Anything plastic to withstand the humidity will work. Also, I hope those vines are the heated kind -- they are waaaay too hot for the crested's feet. If they are unplug and don't turn them on.
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0.1 Albino Leo Gecko
0.1 Crested Gecko
1.0 Dear Boyfriend
Departed: Harvey and Spock

so anyhow it got a little cold last night probably arround 65 which i think anything below 70 is too cold for them right? would a heat pad behind the rock backround of the exoterra do the trick possibly? I think there range is supposed to be 70-78ish? my newest thought is that they are probably geting too chilly at night. i am indeed a bit confused on the 2male or 2 female thing being housed together though. in the rapashy book they seem to not think its a problem however what books state and what really happens sometimes are indeed two different things. i think the difference between my male cages and the females is that the females stay warmer being as they have a stand and are up above the ground. i have not had the money yet to get a stand for the 2 male cages. so anyhow being low or on the ground it is always a good deal cooler then being at couch level like my girls.
i should have wrote something in my last post but they have a good amount of cork bark in there for hiding purposes but you cant see it in my photos it is normally their favorite spot or in the ficus. i suppose they switch up every few days actually. they do have water on the ground normally but i had taken it out to clean it, sorry. i also mist their cage everynight and i see them drinking the water off the leaves so i know they are at least drinking, they seem to get happy when they get to enjoy that. no, the vines are not heated. they are just plain vines.
when you say "hide" do you mean like something that i would give my leos? they all have gladwear containers that have black tape all over to aviod light and a whole in the lid.
these glass cages are a pain. i have had to remake them a few times also because i did it wrong so im sure that didnt help their stress level at all. i am seriously thinkging about switching to all fake plants instead because it is a pain with real ones. also it is probably safer and has several other benefits. i like my leo racks a lot better lol. paper towels and platic are the best! haha do you have fake plants? if so what do you use for substrate paper towels? do you have a picture of it? by the way my substrate is the formula recomended in the repashy book.

It would be better to keep the temps at "normal human" room temps, something like 72F is perfect, 65F is getting low (ok for a bit, but if you are lower = bad) and 85 is too high. Be very careful with heating pads, we put in one when our heat went out and it dropped below 65F. Crested don't seem to know what is good for them and can easily overheat or burn themselves. I would only suggest a heating pad if you had a thermostat or something to degrade the heat level. Until you get the stands, storage boxes and crates can lift the cage up, we all have those sitting around. You are probably adding to the stress of them by having them so low to the ground. We experienced this with our first leo, he was very stressed by being at knee height. Everyone that walked by him was much higher and, in his eyes, a predator. (Remember that birds are enemy) I wouldn't be surprised if that was the same for a crested.

From speaking to people here and someone that sold cresties for a while, it seems that the best is to separate them as soon as possible - even before you can tell the sexes. Sounds like they are very aggressive and territorial and the theory is that this is the cause of so many captive bred cresteds losing tails. There is some feeling that if you give them a TON of extra space you may get away with more geckos, but they certainly are not as tolerant as leos to each other.

As for hides, something like your leos are fine. We have a plastic hide intended for hamsters (because I thought it was cute), but tupperware will work too. I would stay away from the tape, cresteds seem to eat everything in sight. Think more holes on the sides than the top, but they might go in... be prepared to clean the hides every week... they will poo in them, unfortunately.

I don't have a picture handy, but we have a really basic set up right now. A 10 gallon (what she lived in when she was little) with a 10 gallon wire mesh cage on top. (Basically makes it a tall 20 gallon.) We like it better than the tall 29 we had been given with the intent to keep her there, the wire mesh is fun to watch her climb on and gives her a break from the glass. (Some have posted here that hanging on glass all day is bad for the geckos and can cause pain and such, I haven't read much about it, save for what is posted here.) We don't have any real plants. We feel really strongly about sanitation after we lost Harvey to parasites. Everything we have must be thrown away or bleached every 6 months. We use paper towels for substrate and have 2 strings of fake leaves and one "tree". Add to that a hide, water bowl, and a CGD bowl and that's it. She gets a light cycle from sitting next to the leo's cage and that's about all she needs. Breeders do keep cresteds in tall plastic storage boxes, but I don't recommend it as why have pets if you don't get to enjoy them?

Hope this helps, good luck.
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0.1 Albino Leo Gecko
0.1 Crested Gecko
1.0 Dear Boyfriend
Departed: Harvey and Spock

You can also house crested geckos in a rack system similar to what you have your leos in. You just have to choose tubs that are higher. I keep my adult crested geckos in 55L sterlite containers (58qts model number #1858) with papertowel as a substrate and towels for climbing areas with lots of fake vines and plants. I just put the feed dishes on the floor and they have no trouble finding their food.

Given the fact these crested geckos have been housed together, neglected etc, they probably had to fight eachother for what food was given them, probably eating their young as they hatch, those that make it out of the egg anyway. As there is no way to tell which is the original pair, I wouldn't breed any of these males and females with each other, to avoid excessive inbreeding. Once healthy you certainly can breed them to known non related crested geckos.

ya i totally here you there on the inbreeding thing. however i do remember a few years back the large male and female. this was b4 they were neglected i would check them outwhen i was over and i am sure they are the originals but the rest i would be scared to do anything with breeding wise.