Help needed, Gecko not eating!

[ciderxwithxrosie]

Hi everyone,

We're having difficulty getting our leopard gecko to eat crix. She's 4 years old and we've just taken her off my younger sister's friend and to be honest, she is very undernourished and about half the size she should be. We've had her 5 days now and in that time we've alternated crix and mealworms and she's only eaten two crix and has lapped up maybe 8 or so mealworms. She's just so slow with crix though, she watches them closely as if she's about to pounce and when she gives up turns her back, they're hidden and that's that, she doesn't hunt them out or there is no evidence of her hunting them out.

We've tried many different things to get her to eat, including moving her into a different box with a few crix in it to eat but she just sat, confused. We did have some big hideous leaf thing in the corner where they'd hide so we've removed that tonight and fingers crossed she gets her arse into gear and eats something but it's really distressing my mum, well all of us but particularly her.

We need our Maggie eating all she can, she is so thin! It's almost likely we've rescued her :s

But please help, what can we do to get her eating something heartier than mealworms?

 

[Astrael]

I've got two from a petstore, and they both have been pretty healthy. But they won't touch crickets. They mostly prefer mealworms with roaches now and then. Giant mealworms also work. From what I've learned from others on another forum about geckos, mealworms are quite good for them.

If you wanna try to put some weight then you'd have to start looking towards things like waxworms (usually just for a treat, but should definitely help add some padding to her), butterworms, or I hear geckos especially like hornworms. I haven't tried that yet, we usually get a bunch of hornworms as a Christmas treat for our lizards. Oh yeah, our geckos (and a few other people's as well) HATE pheonix worms. They will not eat them. Just as a note.

Just keep offering mealworms, or superworms if they're available. They usually don't eat every day as adults, plus if she just moved, she could have relocation stress. Best to not handle her too much and just leave worms in a dish. Try the crickets again in a few days after she calms down a bit.

 

[ciderxwithxrosie]

Thanks for the reply, some good points made. Just wanted to make sure we weren't fretting over nothing, she really is just not bothering with food no matter how hard we try! Poor mite. We're ringing our local Reptile Rescue tomorrow to see what they recommend and if we can take her in and get her looked over and what not.