Planning on getting my first gecko, questions about feeding.

ClPat · #1 07-02-2009, 02:58 PM

Hi Everyone.
I'm from Haiti (Hispaniola island) and apart from turtles and iguanas, very few herps are kept, and so it is impossible for me to buy crickets and other similar live food for geckos. However I am planning on getting one and I was thinking about the golden gecko. My question is, can their diet be almost exclusively made of varied fruits? I would also throw in their cage a few moths found at night around lamps, but would fruits/baby food/crested gecko food(which I can order) with perhaps vitamins/supplements be sufficient as the bulk of their diet. Is it isn't possible I'll have to go for another gecko.
Thank you.

cliff_f · #2 07-02-2009, 07:17 PM

I would not make the diet exclusively on fruits. But you could find a good remote location where pesticides are not used and pick up grasshoppers, crickets, roaches and feed them. If you wanted to you could collect some of your local crickets and try breeding them so you have some on hand. I would try to feed insects as much as you can so they can have their protein.

ClPat · #3 07-02-2009, 10:02 PM

Would the golden gecko eat canned insects (the stuff sold in pet stores...) or would they require live bugs?
Is they can't eat canned, I might have to breed roaches...i'm gonna look so weird...lol...

**Riverside Reptiles** · #4 07-02-2009, 11:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ClPat

Would the golden gecko eat canned insects (the stuff sold in pet stores...) or would they require live bugs?
Is they can't eat canned, I might have to breed roaches...now to try and explain it to my mom...

You're going to want some live food. I've never seen any gecko eat bugs from a can.

cliff_f · #5 07-02-2009, 11:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riverside Reptiles

You're going to want some live food. I've never seen any gecko eat bugs from a can.

I have actually seen a gecko that someone was feeding canned insects....well lets just say that from the look of the poor guy he would of been way better off on freshly gutloaded like insects. Also he had to hand feed it everyday and try to make the insects look like they were alive. So that is really not a good choice.

holocaustto · #6 07-03-2009, 12:22 AM

Maybe not the best choice, but for the moment you are out of live insects, it could work. Just make them look alive. With tweezers or someting.
Good luck

Ingo · #7 07-03-2009, 03:14 AM

keep a small colony of -non pest-roaches. If neccessary order the first ones online from abroad and pay the extra shipping costs. Keeping a colony alive and prolific is as easy as cheap. Than catch an occasional moth, cricket or grasshopper and you can offer your gecko the diet it needs. That is not much work and if you are not ready to invest this, you are not ready for getting into geckos.
You can also construct a light trap , which in your area will collect enough feeder insects every night for more than one gecko. Its five minutes work a day ...

Ingo

holocaustto · #8 07-03-2009, 03:34 AM

Ingo, do you have anything to show how to construct a light lamp to catch insects?

Ingo · #9 07-03-2009, 03:39 AM

All you need is a strong spotlight and a vertically fixed white bed sheet. This attracts a lot of insects at night, which you have to collect manually from the bed sheet.
In an insect rich area, you do not need more than 5 minutes to collect the weekly ration for a golden gecko.

Ingo

ClPat · #10 07-04-2009, 03:52 PM

Thanks for the answers and don't worry I will make sure that they get a varied diet of roaches, moths, worms, fruits and baby food. I was asking these questions because I thought it would be easier but I will never let ease take over the well-being of an animal.
Another thing I was thinking, was sre everyone's thoughs about wild-caught geckos? In Haiti we have a few native geckos including the antillean house gecko, hemidactylus Haitianus, which isn't endangered or anything, so Maybe I could keep one...