Reptile & Amphibian Forums

It's Speckles' (that's the new leo's name) 2nd day home tomorrow, and he's a 6 month old, so I planned on trying to feed him tomorrow, but I'm not exactly sure what method to do. Should I just throw crickets in, leave for a half hour to an hour (because he's very shy), and then see what's left and see if there's any hiding anywhere or what?

By the way, the place I got him from is a very good local petshop that works through local breeders. One of the employees there is actually a leo breeder, and they say that they usually just dump about a dozen per gecko into the tank once or twice a week. i thought the excess crickets would bother them and possibly chew on them? I always heard you're supposed to remove crickets after feeding.

I was thinking about seeing if the crickets would get out of his slick-sided ceramic water dish...if not, I thought I could try putting them in that like when i got home from school or something, and then removing the excess would be much easier...assuming they didn't get out. Then afterwards i'd fill it back up with water....maybe it would be best to get a seperate one for crickets?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Well...crickets left in your cage can chew up your poor leo, but they do this when they are starving...but you can stop that if you put a dish of veggies or something in for the crickets to eat and gut-load themselves. But, crickets can annoy the leo and poop all over the place and be very unhygenic, so for my shy leos, I get a smooth dish, get some crickets, snap their jumping legs (gross, but nessasary) and dump them into the dish with some cricket food and a bit of calcium powder. The crickets can't escape and they stay filled with nutriets, so your gecko can come out in the night and eat them. ^^

Or you can try dropping mealworms or crickets right in front of your leo's hidey-hole. My baby leo eats like this, I drop food in front of his house, he'll pop out to eat it, thern slink back in. ^^

Hope this helps a bit. ^^

crickets are too much of a pain in the butt.

mealworms baby!

Won't the chitin (or whatever it's called) cause problems?

I just dumped about 5 crix in, and I have got to get rid of the papertowels and throw some shelf liner down instead, because those stupid crix are already getting underneath it.

i know alot of breeders who just feed their loes mealies, even the juvis. if you want to be safe, just feed your leos the white mealies, those are the oens who have jsut shed

I would try feeding at night and let them stay in for about an hour then pull them out. I agree it can get vary unhygenic if you leave them in. As far as snaping the legs its way to time consuming for me, guess its about personal prefrence. good luck!
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Yeah. I think if you are going to leave crickets in all of the time you definately have to make sure they are full...and probably it's a good idea to continue to feed them and whatnot...and then afterwards you'll probably have cricket droppings and stuff too clean up....it sounds more complicated than just picking out the uneaten crickets if you ask me, so I'm going to try doing it that way.

I think I'll drop maybe 4 crickets or so in, and systematically come check in every half hour to an hour to see if anywere eaten...where they might be hiding, etc. etc. etc. If this doesn't work, I'll do the bowl method. I'll just have to figure out which one is going to work better. Just dumping crickets in would probably work out a lot better once the leo gets used to me, because then he won't be too shy to come out and eat them right away, and it won't stress him out too bad when I poke around afterwards looking for crickets.

I was just sitting in the family room watching TV and doing homework, and I finally caught him out for a bit! The first time he came out and just looked around before turning around and going back into his cool hide. A little while later he came out and slowly walked over to the warm hide (I think he did it slowly hoping I wouldn't notice). My mom said this morning when she woke up he was running around all over the place, so tomorrow morning if he is again I told my mom to wake me up early so I can come watch him a little bit.

He seems really healthy so far, and I'm hoping once he gets used to use he won't be so shy about showing his face.