Reptile & Amphibian Forums

is it easier than it seems.. i cant find a way that works the best without making a mess or having to pick them up one by one and that takes too long for the number of geckos I have.

do you use tongs or your hands??
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1. thoroughbred. rocket.
1. albino leopard. deimos.
1. jack russell terrier. nipper.

The why I do it is I have a tub of weat and mealies. I just grab a handfull of the weat and drop it back onto the top layer of weat. This makes the handful of mealie wiggle on the top and you can grab like 10 that way.

This way you dont have to search for them, just make them sqerm on the serface and grab them up quick.

Austin
2.3.3

and picking them up one by one takes too long
surely there is a more efficient way of picking them up than just using my hands or my forceps..
how do the mealworm, superworm, and waxworm farms do it?
like reptilefood.com or any of the other places.. for example..
or maybe some of the leopard gecko breeders that produce a lot of geckos know of a quicker way..
please help.. it gets tiring sitting there picking out mealworms one by one for 10 geckos.. each gecko eats somewhere around 10 or 15 mealworms per feeding and it gets old pretty fast
thanks for your help
-Adam

aw, c'mon- it's not that hard! you have to do that if you feed silkworms (b/c they stick together with silk strands & get their poo stuck in & such), and i have 13 leos, and i feed them silkworms about half the time.

but all you need to make things a little easier is some mesh to sift things through. though it might be harder, if you keep them in oats. but if you keep them in fine keeper-dust (not sawdust, but the commercial stuff they sell to keep them on), you can sift them to at least reduce the amount of bedding. it's bes tot pick through at least half the time, though, to pick out dead & unhealthy-looking ones, i think.

i just raise silkworms until they're almost ready to metamorphose (most places don't sell them that size), and then they're really pretty easy to pick out, and you only need one or two per gecko for a feeding (versus quite a few mealworms).
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marla
currently: 0.0.9 catfish, 0.1 ferrets, 2.8.3 leopard geckoes, 0.0.13 oriental fire-bellied toads, and 0.2.0 sugar gliders

It depends on how big your mealies are compared to the substrate they are on. I use non-medicated chick mash so when I sift out the baby mealies I use a kitchen strainer, the babies fall through and most of the mash stays in the strainer( you could also use different size screen from a hardware store).For my adults I made a sifter out of screen that let's the adults stay in the screen and let's the mash flow through. This set-up works great and only takes me about 3 min. to sift 1000 mealies.Hope this helps

or just email..?
thanks

Put egg cartons in the cage. The mealies will climb up on it.
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Leo Land
The best and biggest leopard gecko site on the net!

np

Put half a potato in the mealie bin. Wait 10 minutes (maybe less). pick up the potato. many mealies will be attached.