Tokay Gecko Feeding: Five Minutes of Insects, Nothing Wider Than the Head, and Mice as a Rare Treat

A tokay is a large, aggressive, nocturnal gecko with an appetite to match, and feeding one is mostly a matter of not overdoing it. Here is what goes in, how much, on what schedule, and how to read a tokay that stops eating.

Feeding Schedule by Age

The five-minute window is the portion. Insects go in at dusk, when the gecko is waking, the gecko takes what it wants, and anything still loose comes out rather than being left to wander. A cricket left overnight chews on a sleeping tokay, and a tokay left with an endless supply eats itself fat.

What Tokay Geckos Eat

An insectivore with a wide mouth. Wild tokays take moths, locusts, grasshoppers, beetles, cockroaches, termites, crickets, mosquitoes and spiders, and the occasional small rat, mouse or snake, hunting by sitting and waiting rather than searching. The captive list follows: crickets, dubia, discoid and red runner roaches, grasshoppers and locusts, hornworms and silkworms as staples, with mealworms and waxworms as richer occasional items. Variety across that list is the diet.

Gut-load for two to three days. The gecko benefits from the insect's last meal, so the feeders eat leafy greens, vegetables, fruit or a commercial gut-load for two or three days before they go in. The gut-loading guide covers what works and why a cricket from the shop is mostly shell until it has eaten.

Dust the calcium. Published schedules split here: one care sheet dusts a light coating of calcium powder on the feeders before every feeding, another dusts at least once a week. Use the heavier end on a growing juvenile and at least twice a week on an adult. The choice of powder follows the lighting: plain calcium under a working UVB bulb, calcium with vitamin D3 without one, which is the standard combination for nocturnal lizards kept without UV. A shallow dish of calcium powder left in a corner lets the gecko top itself up. The UVB lighting guide covers the low-output bulb a nocturnal species uses.

Treats, rarely. A thawed pinky or fuzzy mouse from tongs, and a powdered crested gecko diet, are treats offered no more than twice a month. Some tokays learn to take a defrosted fuzzy from tongs, and it is a useful way to bulk up a thin animal; it is not a diet, and a tokay on regular rodents is on its way to the obesity and fatty liver the savannah monitor health guide describes in a lizard that is fed the same way.

Foods to Avoid

Anything wider than the head. Rodents more than twice a month. Wild-caught insects from anywhere that may have been sprayed, and fireflies, which are toxic. Waxworms as a staple. Fruit as a food rather than a treat, since a tokay is not a crested gecko and the powdered fruit diet is not its meal. And live prey left in the enclosure past the feeding.

Why Tokay Geckos Stop Eating

It is a new import. Most tokays in the trade are wild-caught, and a new arrival is stressed, dehydrated and often parasitized. A refusal in the first weeks is as likely to be the parasites as the settling in, and the reptile quarantine guide covers the fecal screen that sorts them.

It is cold, or dry. A tokay that cannot reach its warm end does not digest, and one that is not being sprayed stops eating before it shows the retained shed that follows. Temperature and humidity are the first two checks.

It is in shed. A day or two off food, and a gecko that eats its own shed.

It is being handled. A tokay is not a handling animal, and a gecko that is picked up daily is a gecko under stress. Feed at lights-out and leave it alone.

It is gravid. A female carrying eggs slows down in the days before she lays, and her calcium matters more than ever.

Winter. A tokay kept with a seasonal cool-down eats less through it while holding its weight.

When to Worry

A few nights off food in a warm, humid enclosure is nothing. A refusal past a week, or one with sunken eyes, a kinked tail, a soft jaw, or visible weight loss at the hips and tail base, is the point to see a reptile vet, and the reptile emergency plan guide sorts those signs by urgency. A tokay stores fat in its tail, and a tail that is going thin is the weight loss you can see.

Five minutes of dusted insects at dusk, water on the walls, a mouse twice a month at most. A tokay fed that way is a loud, fast, long-lived gecko, and the restraint is the whole method.

Sources & Further Reading