Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi,

I just cleaned my leopard gecko's cage and put in a little dish of cricket dust (the crickets eat this) as well as some of that golden jelly cricket supplement/food stuff with calcium. A few moments later my gecko went over to the dish and ate a significant amount of the cricket supplement... is this normal? She's never done this before. Will she get sick from eating it? It's a possibility that she was just hungry, because right now there are only 4 crickets in her terrarium (I'm going to get some more tomorrow). But even if she was REALLY hungry, it's just hard to imagine a healthy leopard gecko eating anything but insects..

Thanks.

Eden

No worries it is very normal, in fact you should have a small dish of calcium in there anyway for your leo to take when it needs it. On a side note I have never heard of crickets eating it either where did you get that? My crickets are simply dusted with it before feeding

My Research and Collection

I just put in a dish of cricket dust one day, and they ate it. I like to do it better this way because then the calcium stays "in" the crickets, rather than rubbing off on to the substrate or washing off when a cricket jumps into the water dish, etc.

I would be sure to gut load your crickets prior to feeding them to your gecko. Healthy crickets equals healthy geckos. The fact that they are eating the calcium powder might indicate that they are starving.

Am I correct that their are constantly crickets in your leo's cage? I'm sure other leo keepers will back me up on this when I say it's better to feed on a meal to meal basis then to keep prey in at all times. It can lead to stress on your lizard if he's constantly "bugged"

As the other respondent mentioned, your leo eating cricket dust is of no consequence.

Ian

Thats exactly correct. Every now and then my Leopard Geckos dont eat all the crickets one one or two might stay in there for a few hours untill one grabs it but lets just say I put them in there in the morning before work, If there are any left when I stop for lunch I will remove them, I generaly dont use crickets anyway, I feed my Leopard Geckos Mealworms, My youngest one has not yet got a sweet tooth for the worms so he still eats crickets but my older Gecko eats Mealworms exclusivly
My Research and Collection