Crested geckos are frugivores and should receive a balanced fruit diet to ensure they thrive. Live foods may provide enrichment or even encourage natural hunting responses in crested geckos; however, they aren’t essential for their survival.
Make sure that all feeder insects are gut loaded and dustdried prior to feeding them to your crestie, in order to avoid choking and impaction. Food items no larger than the width of their head should also be offered as this helps avoid potential hazards such as choke-choke.
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Insects
Crested geckos enjoy feeding on insects like crickets, worms, dubia roaches, meal worms and wax worms to meet their nutritional requirements and to maintain a balanced diet. Not only are these food sources rich in proteins; they’re also excellent sources of calcium and D3 plus offer an opportunity for interaction between pet owner and reptile alike!
Before feeding any insects to your crested gecko, it is wise to gutload and dust all insects. This helps ensure they are nutritious and more likely to resemble what their pet might eat in nature – large insects won’t be consumed, while too small of an insect won’t provide adequate nutrition.
Many crested geckos enjoy eating fruits in addition to insects. You can provide your frugivorous geckos with papaya, pears, apples, bananas, watermelons and other treats as a weekly or biweekly treat.
Fruit
Crested geckos make excellent beginner reptiles to keep, as they can be kept at ambient room temperatures while eating a diet of fruit and insects. A good quality gecko complete diet such as Pangea Gecko Diet: Growth & Breeding Formula or the Pangea Geckos Fruit Mix Complete will suffice, along with gutloaded/dusted live crickets, waxworms, earthworms, fruit flies, moths or grasshoppers offered every two to four days as supplements.
ZooMed and Flukers CGDs contain many fillers which make digestion harder for geckos and aren’t nutritionally balanced enough. Luckily, the market now offers Lugarti CGD and Arcadia StickyFootGold that more closely replicate wild gecko food by offering higher ratios of insect to fruit compounds; crested gecko’s fed a combination of prepared diet and live feeders will grow much more rapidly than ones fed just prepared diet alone.
Vegetables
There is much misinformed advice available online and in pet shops about feeding this relatively new species of pet fish, usually outdated methods which have since been improved upon.
Geckos shake their bodies cyclically to thrash scorpions against the walls and ground of their tank, minimizing any chance that their pointy tail injects them with poisonous venom. “It’s similar to seals when they pick up fish and slap them against the water,” according to Malachi Whitford who studied gecko behavior as an undergraduate research assistant at Utah State University.
Fruit should only be offered occasionally to encourage natural hunting behavior from your gecko. As part of an overall nutrition program for your gecko, they should receive quality CGD (complete gecko diet) along with live foods like insect mealworms or waxworms that contain beneficial nutrients for their overall health.
Waxworms
Waxworms are larvae of the galleria mellonella wax moth. Waxworms provide an ideal alternative to other feeder insects due to being much softer and posing less of a risk of choking for smaller birds. Furthermore, they have unique claspers on their feet which enable them to secure themselves onto surfaces using gripping action.
Waxworms use their pads to grab onto surfaces while also using them as breathing tubes (known as spiracles) to take in oxygen from their surroundings.
Waxworms can be found at pet stores and fishing bait shops, or they can be raised at home using sawdust as bedding in an airtight container in the fridge until ready for feeding them to your cresty.
Try not to feed your cresty straight baby food as this lacks essential vitamins and nutrients that your gecko needs and could lead to metabolic bone disease. Instead, incorporate fruits with a 2:1 Calcium: Phosphorous ratio like banana, mango or papaya into their diet for added benefits.
