[Music] other than ball pythons leopard geckos are the animal that everyone seems to ask about when they can't get it to eat so today i just want to go over some tips to get your leopard gecko that refuses to eat anything to actually get it to start chowing down the very first technique is very simple because the majority of people that ask why their gecko will not eat are people that just got the animal a number of days ago it's extremely common for an animal that's brand new to a home not to be settled in
yet because it has to get adjusted to the home get used to you get used to the area the new scents the new stuff in the enclosure it's a completely new thing and so although a lot of animals really enjoy the enrichment of a brand new space they can explore leprechauns i found tend to be a species that just prefer to kind of stay the same and not change too much so for that reason they often take a bit longer to get used to their home and they might not start eating on day one like
a lot of other animals like usually when i think of a lizard they're just like easy like a bearded dragon say even though they have plenty of difficult aspects in their husbandry it's pretty rare to get a bearded dragon that just refuses to eat anything even if it eats unhealthy stuff like fruit or whatever you can get it to eat something but leprechauns on the other hand just won't even acknowledge the food and this often happens for the first number of days or weeks now a very simple explanation of basically seeing first of all when
you're looking at your left rig echo there's some pretty simple ways to tell whether it is over or underweight which that's not what this video is about basically their plump tail is where all their nutrition is and as long as they're not building up fat deposits in other places then this tail can just be as big as it needs to be and so when your egg is not eating it has a lot of nutrition stored in that tail that it can lose over time something i've noticed with leopard geckos is just how individualized their metabolism
is and how quickly or slowly they lose weight so we've cared for about 25 leper geckos so far and there are some that lose weight very quickly within just if they don't eat for like a week you can easily tell even if you don't see them that often it's just as soon as you see them you're like wow they've lost a lot of weight but there's also been some that have not eaten for a very long time which i'll talk about why but they did not lose any weight basically anything for months so my point
in mentioning that is although it's good to be concerned when your animal's not eating it's also okay not to completely panic because it's very easy to tell with leopard geckos whether they're underweight or not and you're gonna notice pretty quickly because it's all just right there it's like a little tail meter like you just know if that thing is plump and voluptuous and beautiful and squishy don't squeeze it but if it's nice and big you know you've got time until it runs out it's kind of like a gas tank or something like you can very
easily tell and then same thing when it's very small or thin if it's looking like a crested gecko tail you're having some problems it might be on the brink of death that's why it's very concerning when a gekko loses his tail which although new leper geckos have lost their tails here we've gotten geckos that lost them like days or weeks before we pick them up and so you just have to be super careful and super tedious because that's where all of their nutrition was and they can very rapidly become unhealthy so i got kind of
off on a tangent but basically if you just got your leper gecko it's fine even if it doesn't eat for a few days or even a few weeks that's okay usually what we do is once gekkos have hit like the one week mark that's when we start really trying things to see why it will not eat and the second biggest reason other than not waiting long enough for the animal to settle in is it simply doesn't like the insect you're giving it they're complete insectivores no plants no like rodents even though they can technically eat
like a little pinky here and there it's really not part of their diet so stick to insects and people will tell you different types of insects to feed them because everyone kind of argues over what's the healthiest or what's the easiest or the safest and we do all sorts of insects here most commonly we feed dubia roaches but we also have a lot of mealworms super worms are around wax worms horn worms i just order everything like all the time only thing we never have is crickets because crickets suck nobody here likes crickets they're not
unhealthy they keep your animal alive but they're just a pain and there's way easier alternatives that are just a little more expensive or cheaper if you go with like mealworms but no matter what you're feeding your leper gecko it may just simply not have a taste for it they are crazy picky just like me but the other weird thing is they changed their preferences this is what i did not expect when getting the leopard geckos um like other lizards here like bearded dragons i know which beardy likes which fruit i know what my blue tongue
skink likes i know what the iguana likes and it's very consistent it just like this one likes strawberries the most this one likes banana um this one likes dandelion greens that's his favorite but left for gekko's very often change and it's happened with a lot here as an example goldie which is my other leopard gecko i got him in 2014 and when i got him he came with a bunch of super worms for free because i said he was being fed i kept feeding the super worms 14 year old me got some plants that turns
out was poisonous for the super worms so i killed the entire super one colony now it's good to keep in mind whenever you feed your super worm you're also feeding to your gecko so only feed stuff that's safe and healthy for reptiles in general again that's aside the point i killed all the super worms so i had to get some new insects and i ended up going with i think mealworms at the time but he really just did not want them seaforms and mealworms are extremely similar but they were not similar enough for him so
thankfully eventually he did start taking them but then all of a sudden he just stopped taking mealworms uh he didn't eat for a number of weeks but eventually i just made the realization that he just didn't want me arms anymore and it turns out he wanted i think it was crickets at the time uh and then he ended up switching back to super worms and then back to millworms and now he's on dubias one time he refused dubia so i had to go back to worms and now he's on dubious again so he's a little
less picky now he does eat multiple insects but there are those that are not as have as big of a taste palette as goldie we re home and work with a lot of animals some are rescues some just need new homes and are perfectly healthy from the start and one perfectly healthy gecko we got it was the seventh animal we ever got was another lefty gecko and it wouldn't eat anything we didn't know what it was eating before but we had all the insects here we had basically every insect except for super worms and crickets
because we just preferred mealworms and dubia roaches we offered him everything for months and months and months constantly and he wasn't losing any weight so we weren't really concerned for his health he was doing super well and i had other insects hanging around like wax worms and all sorts of we had all sorts of things and we just never bothered getting super worms um but then finally we just happened to have some super worms offered it to him after months of him not eating and he took one turns out he only ate super worms and
he ate them from that point forward crazy good appetite like he hadn't like he had been eating super worms every day for the entire year when he had not eaten anything for so long longer than i've ever seen any leper gecko go but he barely lost any weight and the way that he did lose he gained back in like a few weeks or something maybe a month because he was eating super warm so well so when we sold them we had to make sure the owner knew like we're being serious he won't eat anything but
super worms and we really like like do you understand he's not gonna switch we've tried for months just super worms okay so long story short he didn't like anything with super worms so the second reason is they simply are not a fan of the insect you're offering and they can change that preference so even if you find what they like they might stop eating and start eating something else which isn't necessarily a bad thing because variety is great with reptiles it's a form of enrichment it doesn't it keeps them from being bored and you could
always give them multiple insects you could do like a a trail mix of insects they might start eating each other actually i know some insects kind of eat each other you could have like a plate like platters just like put five bowls in their enclosure do a bunch of insects why not it doesn't hurt so if you want to do that you can i want to make a video about that now that'd be cool and so my my the only downside of this is the fact that you do have to buy lots of different insects
and you might like not be able to source them i usually order insects online sometimes i have to run to petco if i run out and they're not in the mail fast enough which by the way you can use my code or my link in the description for ten percent off dubious dot com and if you're a new buyer i get five dollars in credits so yay you feed the insects i mean you feed the reptiles insects you give me money and then i feed the rafters and sex and you get insects too but basically
uh sometimes i have to just run into petco and grab something but i've realized petco doesn't have a huge selection they only have like three or four different insects and mine at least so yeah you might have some trouble with this but that's the second reason and the third that i found is they are not a fan of what you are supplementing the insects with hopefully if you have leftover geckos you're aware of the supplements that people suggest i did a video on their care where i went over how i supplement them but long story
short ideally the insects will have calcium and multivitamins on them and these if you smell them they have a pretty strong smell just don't smell them too much because you might snort them and it's like powder and it it probably won't feel good i don't know why i'm adding that no not that i've done it or anything but because they have a strong smell you can just assume that they have a strong taste too uh and some lefer geckos just don't like the taste they'll lick them and they'll be like yuck that's that's gross i'm
not eating that i'm not gonna be healthy i'm not taking my flintstones gummies they're not good enough those are really good though uh but theirs don't taste like flintstones gummies flintstones and they might not like them now the problem is ideally your animal will be getting these so my main suggestion would be to just take them off at first if they're eating the insect without it although that's not perfect because they should be getting their multivitamin and stuff at least they're actually eating something and then from here you can maybe try and put calcium or
multivitamins on a couple of the insects like in their enclosure or you could like in the bowl like sort the insects separately put some with some without and kind of just trick them into eating it and hopefully they'll realize that it's really not that bad also calcium is something that you can just completely separate into a bowl because usually geckos will know la forget specifically when they have a calcium deficiency and they'll literally just lick it out of the bowl so for some reason they maybe they eat it out of the bowl but not on
the insects usually they seem to just either like it or not which if they do you could always try different brands of vitamins i haven't done this myself but they are different manufacturers and they might have different taste to them i usually go with the herp divite or the zoo med vitamins but that's also just a matter of finding a taste that they like if they aren't a fan of what you're mixing on also maybe they only like one of them so you could try and just one day just put those the other day put
nothing and then just eventually kind of trick them into eating them if you just occasionally pop them on a couple that's kind of what i had to do to trick my turtle into eating plants i had to get plants that kind of looked like pellets like cut up leaves so they're like pellet shape and then trick them and realize it's actually not that bad so basically the third tip is to see if it's something with the multivitamin or calcium as to why they're refusing the food now the fourth reason i have is that you might
be feeding those freeze-dried insects i just have a grudge against these i mean i think it's partially justified but i also just they just seem so lazy of like an owner i mean i get you need to be like efficient and save money but really freeze-dried insects for an animal that's eating insects like why i don't so okay now i i don't i haven't done a ton of research on these i don't believe they're as healthy i can't imagine they are because they're literally frozen and dried which are two processes that deteriorate food and take
out the nutrition so although i don't actually know all the details on whether it's how like how safe it is or how healthy it is uh which you can refer to the comments if you know about that uh but basically lefreques are they're not gonna eat them i've heard of like two leper geckos eating them in my life they don't move there's nothing that seems food like to a lepre gecko although it may have a tiny bit of scent even after being dried out it's they they look for those moving things so very simple fourth
reason is you might just be feeding freeze dried get some live ones if your family doesn't want live in the house or if you don't want live then you're stuck because that is kind of a necessity now okay this is coming from someone that doesn't really like bugs i mean i don't not like them i just don't understand them and i'm kind of scared of them but once you have them for a bit you get used to them like i started having to like i had to hold up super warm with a tongue with i
guess two tongs a tongue is it a tong or tongs i had to hold my insects with tongs no matter what i still prefer it that way but now i am comfortable enough to where like if i see one on the floor i can just pick it up yes i kind of flick it into its enclosure because i don't want to touch it for too long basically you kind of get over it if your family's not a fan just sneak him into the house and then the fifth reason is the size of the insect might
just be freaking your gecko out nobody wants to try and kill something with your mouth when it's the size of your head uh yes i guess snakes do that and maybe turtles and some lizards basically if this insect's too large your left gecko might either not see it as food or it'll just be too scared or too intimidated to bite into it so basically my personal rule is trying to feed gekko's leprechaun specifically insects that are half the size of their head are smaller so for this it could be eating like a medium or large
dubia a full size mealworm or something a smallish super worm which it can eat bigger because i know that this one will but they won't all so like if you give your leopard gecko a roach that's the size of its head or even a little bigger it might try and bite it it might have some trouble because it's too big to fit in its mouth which it could kind of crush it up but it might just not eat it because it's too large or maybe it is the quantity maybe it's you filled the bowl up
to the brim so it's just like a swamp of insects let's just try a couple at a time uh we bowl feed okay she's still there we always bowl feed the geckos but you could also try tong feeding and see if uh it's not a fan of bowls or a fan of tongs so you could try bowl feeding if you are trying to tong feed so like i said we've cared for a few dozen leftover geckos now and those are the three things that have always worked for us there's nothing been past that but it's
possible you're still stuck after trying all this stuff in which case that's all i got you can check the comments if you have any tips that i did not mention in this feel free to link them below so those are my tips on getting your gecko to eat again it's very easy to tell when a leprechaun's on the verge of death because their tail really helps you out assuming they're dying from starvation and not something else so just keep an eye on that tail remember to weigh your gecko it really helps out if you keep
track of the weight so you can get a scale on amazon for like five dollars maybe ten dollars and that really helps to just see how your gecko is doing if you want the full care guide you can check that out i have that link below or go to goherping.com leper geckos and i'll leave all of my supplies that i use with my leopard gecko in the description those are amazon affiliate links so i get money when you buy the stuff and i can buy more animals and film my addiction [Music] you
