Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've been having a bit of difficulty with baby food and CGD. For starters, I'm having difficulty even telling if my geckos are eating the foods. (One juvenile ~6months, One adult female)
They're seperate. room temperature is an ambient 78~ degrees, as for humidity I mist them every morning and every night.

How do all of you lay out your CGD? I've got mine sitting in a cups on the floor of the tank and I can never tell if they're eating any of it. Should I get some sort of plastic baking sheets and lay a spoon full out on it? I'm sure that would make it more obvious as to whether they're eating or not but I'm also concerned it may dry out too fast and when I see white spots or fuzz I pull the food out asap.

Does the food need to be pulled out during the day to prevent open exposure? How much should I be putting out for the Juvie? I definitely do not put out as much for him/her as I do for the adult, probably half the amount actually. How much for the adult?

As for the Quantities part of the topic header; How many crickets would they be expected to eat?

I put 12 small crickets in my juvie's cage the other night and when I checked the cage in the morning I only found 2-3 little crickets hopping around. This morning there was only one left.

I got some large crickets from my adult and she semmed totally uninterested. She bit one in half and left both halfs on the bottom of the cage to rott. the rest I placed in there were either found mysterisouly dead (completely intact, no crushed body parts), or still lively in the morning.
This morning I gave up on the large crickets and let the ones still kicking out in my front yard.

I intend to buy more of them, in a slightly smaller size today.

I g2g, I'll be back tonight

Do you know what they were primarily eating before you received them? Obviously, if it was something different, then we have to wean them onto what you would like to feed.

First of all, CGD is, of course, a complete formula, no need for babyfood or crickets. That being said, I believe that gut loaded and multivitamin dusted crickets should be offered to sub adults as I feel it accelerates their growth, however 12 seems like a lot. If your adult doesn't want them, there is no need to feed them. Even breeding females can do just fine on CGD alone.

Secondly, after that first statement that means we need to ditch the babyfood. Now, are you mixing the two together? If so, it is easy to get them onto 100% CGD by slowly increasing the ratio of CGD to babyfood at each feeding. (In fact, these instructions are on the bottle.)

I'm not sure what you mean by cups. A lot of people use the caps from babyfood jars as it is typically the right size and nice and shallow. I prefer stoneware, so my geckos both eat/ drink from "dipping sauce" dishes, basically over sized soy sauce shallow bowls. As for time in cage, there was a recent "discussion" about this, but the bottle says only 12 hours. Now I have found that a lot of geckos like their food "aged" and mine will lick her bowl clean if I leave it in for 24, but doesn't seem to like it fresh, more of a dried fruit leather consistency. But, yes, signs of mold must go immediately and I wouldn't recommend more than 24 hours in the cage. Almost forgot, I feed from the floor and don't have any concerns about it.

As for amounts... I don't think there are many here that can for sure say they noticed their babies eating the CGD, it is simply that they eat so little it only dimples the surface a bit. Completely normal. As for an adult, check the CGD bottle it was written there at one time, but I believe a 1 Tablespoon of prepared diet is typical.

One note, you might be misting too much, most keepers I know mist only once daily to give a little chance to dry out a bit. Keeps the mold down. However if you are in AZ or something, maybe you'd need to.

I hope I got everything. Good luck and ask any questions you have.
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0.1 Crested Gecko
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