[theresaintucson]

As a newbie to geckoes in general, I have to say how surprised I am at how many crickets my FT can eat in one spell! Last night she ate 6 crickets alone. Tonight I noticed she's ignoring the crickets I just put in. Is that normal? Eating like she's never been fed before and then one night ignoring the food?
Should I remove the crickets she hasn't eaten?

[bbgeckoguy]

I think she stuffed herself and might not be hungry
That definitely does happen.
I would take out the crickets she doesnt eat, they can annoy her

[Leena]

haha that's cute! But you should take out whatever crickets it doesn't eat after an hour.
How big are they?

[MauricesExoticPets]

They can put away some food thats for sure, I track my larger geckos age, weight, SVL, and feeder intake (also by weight) on a weekly basis, with enough information on hand you can make an educated guess as to how much to feed them on a daily basis based on weight and age alone.

I'm inclined to ignore numbers of feeders and go on weight alone. This works well for me becaues I keep a ton of critters, and can't be bothered with sorting that many roaches per day. While feeder size is an important factor, I tend to error on the small feeder side of the range, thats much simpler for me in my situation.

So regardless of feeder size, if your gecko eats say 6 crickets every other night you can try feeding just 3 every night. In most cases you'll be able to slip in an extra one every other evening.

That works out to another 15 feeders a month, and that much more calories. More calories results in more growth and in many cases a more healthy gecko. There is of course a point where you can over do things and being over fat is just as bad as being under fed. Yet in their first year of life this is not going to be an issue because they are using much of their energy to grow.

Adults will need less food to maintain a healthy weight, again tracking weight vs. feeder intake will help here a bunch. By their second year most growth will be extra weight and not additional length. So when your gecko stops growing in length, its time to adjust feeding toward weight maintenance rather than weight gain.

Again, being careful to identify the difference between a gecko of healthy weight and one that is too light or heavy is key. I'm assuming the gecko is fed very well for its entire growing period. Hit or miss feeding results in under weight geckos, and they also tend to be rather unhealthy in the long run.

Maurice Pudlo