You’ve brought home your adorable new geckos, given them names and set up a gorgeous habitat for their comfort and enjoyment. Now, you’re trying to figure out the best way to feed them and keep them healthy. Leopard geckos can eat crickets, roaches, superworms, waxworms, CalciWorms® and mealworms, so it’s not so simple to decide what to feed your new pets. Let’s explore the different pro’s and con’s on these options while keeping in mind that it’s always a good idea to supplement their diet with vitamins and minerals because deficiencies can be life-threatening.

The Cricket Diet

Leopard geckos can survive on an all-cricket diet, but there are more drawbacks than advantages to this plan. Crickets are easy to find at most pet stores, active enough to increase your pet’s feeding response, easy to digest and highly nutritional. That’s why so many pet stores and breeders recommend feeding your leopard geckos crickets when you bring them home for the first time. Once you try feeding your pets crickets, the downsides become quite evident. If you have a keen sense of smell, the first thing you’ll notice is the terrible odor that infuses your surroundings, even when you only buy small quantities of these feeder insects. Sensitive ears will notice the loud chirping, making crickets a bad choice for habitats that are located in bedrooms. They’re also great escape artists and hiders, so they can easily lodge themselves in other places in your home and start chirping away. Leopard geckos also have a bit of a love-hate relationship with these insects, who annoy them by nibbling on their tails and toes, and they are also more likely to harbor disease than other types of feeder insects. If that’s not enough to warn you off, the difficulty you’ll have keeping them alive and healthy to feed your pets might be the last straw.

The Dubia Roach Approach

Feeding your leopard geckos dubia roaches has many advantages over crickets. They aren’t able to jump, so you don’t have to worry about them escaping from their enclosure and infesting your home. Another big plus is that they are odorless, so they can be kept in a bedroom, office or other setting that’s shared with humans. They do require some work to make them properly nutritious for your pets. For starters, dubia roaches must be fed a diet of fresh veggies, fruits and whole grain cereals in order to make them high enough in proteins for your leopard gecko’s needs. They also must be gut loaded with nutritious powdered food at least twelve hours before you feed them to your leopard geckos. This is done by placing the roaches in a container with the powder and a potato to provide hydration.

Leopard Geckos Love Superworms

Superworms are a tasty treat that leopard geckos love because they’re very high in fat, making them super delicious. The problem is that if they’re fed to leopard geckos on a regular basis they can cause crippling obesity, so moderation is key. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to only feed superworms to leopard geckos once in a while and never more than once a week. Superworms are much larger than other leopard geckos feeder options, so they’re best suited as treats for adults. Smaller superworms can be fed to juvenile leopard geckos, but close supervision is recommended to ensure the safety of your pet because these worms are able to fight back and might be able to injure younger geckos. Superworms are a great source of phosphorus, an important nutrient for geckos, but large quantities are not recommended because they can cause metabolic bone disease. It’s also a good idea to sprinkle superworms with calcium to mitigate the potential for metabolic bone disease. You don’t have to gut load superworms before giving them to your pets as treats, but feeding them oats, carrots or sweet potatoes improves their nutritional value.

Waxworms and CalciWorms®

Waxworms and CalciWorms® are not intended for feeding leopard geckos on a regular basis. They’re supplements that are meant to enhance your pet’s diet that should be used in moderation. Waxworms are helpful when your gecko is losing weight because geckos love these high fat treats and will sometimes eat them even if they are refusing all other food. The reason they must be used in moderation is that geckos can get used to them and refuse other food, causing obesity. CalciWorms®, a trademarked name for black soldier fly larvae, has a naturally high calcium level that can reduce your dependency on gut loading and dusting other types of leopard gecko food with calcium. That said, CalciWorms® should not be used as the sole diet for your pets because they lack the full range of vitamins and minerals that are needed for proper leopard gecko nutrition.

Mealworms are the Sweet Spot

There’s no harm in offering leopard geckos some variety in their diet, but mealworms are one of the few foods that can be an exclusive source of nutrition. The advantages of feeding leopard geckos are numerous and include:

• They are a low activity species, making them easy for your gecko to hunt;
• Mealworms can’t climb up walls and escape from enclosures;
• Mealworms can be kept fresh in a refrigerator for weeks where they will become inactive and require no food or water;
• They are not too high in fat;
• They can be gut loaded to add calcium;
• They don’t make any noise; and
• They don’t have any bad odor.

Breeders and pet shops often recommend feeding crickets when your leopard geckos are young, but as they grow up you can avoid the noise, smell and other disadvantages of crickets by feeding them mealworms instead. Mealworms are very easy to feed because they can simply be placed in a shallow feeding dish where your leopard gecko can eat them whenever they want. Mealworms can be stored in the fridge, but it’s important to take them out at least 24 hours before feeding them to your pet so that they become active. Once they’re moving around, provide carrots and apples for the mealworms to eat, and don’t forget to dust them with vitamin powder before feeding them to your leopard geckos. When you follow these instructions, you can feel confident feeding a mealworm exclusive diet because most leopard geckos with longevity records were fed nothing other than mealworms.