Leopard gecko questions

Question

i have had my gecko since october, i bought it as a baby. for a long time i held it every day so it lost a lot of it's skittishness. recently there have been no meal worms around so i have been forced to feed it wax worms. i don't know the gender. it has been biting me a lot recently. why is that? is it the change of food or is it a possible puberty kind of thing?

Answer 1

It could be hormonal.  Or it could be that your gecko is falling ill, and becoming stressed or irriated.  It could be that she's feeling hungry.

Your gecko could be getting fat, and still starving to death.  Wax worms have no nutritional value.  This could quickly become a health problem.

Giving wax worms to reptiles is like giving candy to human babies, or taking young children to McD's for every meal.  It's fattening - but not good for them.  Wax worms should only be offered rarely, and as a treat.

Mealworms are also not a good staple diet.  Even gut loaded they provide little nutrition, and the chitinous shell is difficult for most smaller lizards to digest.

I would recommend that you expand her diet to include gut loaded crickets (as small as the length between her eyes), and small silk & Phoenix worms.  She needs a variety of nutrients in her diet, and she can only get this from what the insects are eating.

I'll post a couple of sites below, so you can research how to gut load her insects, or you can just google "gut loading insects" on the internet, and pick the diet you prefer, or sounds best to you.

This one will be for breeding geckos, and the pictures will show you how to tell if you have a male or a female.

http://www.vmsherp.com/LCBreedingLeopard...

Good luck with her.  Hopefully she will stop biting you soon.

Get busy, and feed her better.

I hope this has been of help.

**in answer to your addition - it's very easy to keep crickets alive for her/him.  Write to me at [e-mail] and put KEEPING/GUT LOADING on the subject line, if the sites I posted don't help you learn how to keep the crickets, I will be happy to help you with that.

Answer 2

http://www.reptilecare.com/leopardgender...

thats a site that will tell you all of the stuff about geckos and how to tell the difference of male and female i have 2 leopard geckos and i use this site all the time when i have a question about them

Answer 3

Wax worms are the worst for a staple diet on earth, they're like nothing but sheer fat. I'd at least do crickets or order online, there's several places that even offer free shipping on orders. Gender is easy to tell visibly, and it should be old enough to tell now, do you have a pic.of it? Its hard to tell about the biting, could be because he's hungry because it's not on a proper diet, could be age related, can't be sure.