Are you ready to take on your next adventure or just getting started in the reptile world? Crested Geckos are an evergreen favorite, consistently easy to care for, friendly, and safer than other starter or beginner-friendly reptiles thanks to a combination of their diet and lack of teeth.
Let’s start with the basics! The scientific name of Crested Geckos is “Correlophus ciliatus” and they are a member of the Diplodactylidae family. These geckos natively live in the country of New Caledonia, fairly close to Australia. Crested Geckos are arboreal, meaning that they like to climb!
Unlike frogs, geckos are not sticky or slimy. In fact, their toes work very similarly to velcro and are actually made up of millions of little tiny hairs called "setae". Unlike velcro, though, the setae are able to rid themselves of any stuck debris by the gecko flexing its toes!
Ready to move on to how to care for your new friend? Here's how we care for our geckos.
Enclosures
Juveniles
When you house a juvenile or baby Crested Gecko, you have to keep in mind that they aren’t quite as smart as we're used to with most animals. They can easily get lost in an enclosure and won’t be able to find their food, or become stressed if it’s too open and there aren’t enough places to hide. Here at Gecko Fancy, we personally house our babies and juveniles either in our bin kits you might have seen us with at shows, or our 8x8x12 inch acrylic enclosures. We’ve found that for our juveniles, the size and combination of items in the kit is perfect and allows them enough room to explore but not enough to get lost or stressed.
Adults
For our adult Crested Geckos, this is when it really gets fun with options! Enclosures are very personal, and honestly trial and error. What some keepers prefer is different from others, and it’s the same for the animals too. We have lots of geckos who prefer slightly smaller areas or they get stressed, and lots of geckos who prefer more room to roam. For us, we’ve found the majority of our geckos are the happiest and least stressed in a 12x12x18 inch enclosure. If you find yourself with a gecko that prefers to sleep upside down, we like to switch them to an enclosure around 10 inches tall in order to curb the upside down sleeping and in turn, prevent floppy tail syndrome (FTS).
Substrate
We keep all of our juveniles and babies on paper towel to prevent accidental ingestion of any dirt. Geckos don't tend to encounter dirt very often in the wild, and haven't developed an instinct telling them not to eat the dirt.
Not a fan of the look of paper towel? You can always try ground or fine coconut coir! Coco coir is a natural medium made from ground up coconuts. As long as you find yourself with a pure coco coir product, you shouldn't have to worry about things you might find in dirt like micro plastics, minuscule rocks, or unwelcome visitors like mites.
If you have an adult Crested Gecko, you can always go with a bioactive setup! At their size, if they accidentally swallow any substrate, they should be able to pass it as long as the substrate is fine and not chunky in texture. Think this is the route for you? Make sure you add other essentials to ensure that your tank is a truly self-running bioactive setup! You'll want a clean up crew comprised of at least springtails, but you can always add other isopods for an extra fun pet-for-your-pet type of a thing!
Food
These geckos are relatively easy to feed with a number of complete diets available on the market! Crested Geckos are “frugivores” (sometimes written as "fruitivores") and consume mostly fruit with a recommended mix of live insects like crickets or dubia roaches. On the market right now, you'll be able to choose from a very wide variety of commercially prepared diets. We've tried them all, and our personal favorite is the Lugarti Premium Crested Gecko Diet. It's made of the best ingredients, made in the USA, and is cheaper than a lot of other options on the market!
If you're feeding a nutritionally complete diet like Lugarti, we do not recommend feeding live insects in addition to that diet. Because they are comprised of all of the nutrients that your gecko needs, adding insects in addition adds extra protein, fat, and other things that can cause obesity over time. Live insects are also where you'll typically find nasty things like parasites and salmonella. We recommend staying away from them as much as possible.
We feed our geckos three times per week, Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday. Some breeders recommend removing uneaten food between feeding days, but we find that some of our geckos prefer to eat their food after it's sat for a little bit. Think about it like this, they typically eat rotten fruit in the wild! Some prefer a little extra tang to that scent, if that makes sense.
A lot of our success with growing juveniles and hatchling geckos is by adding honey and bee pollen to our complete diets. These are both natural appetite stimulants and preservatives, so they both help to extend the amount of time a batch is good in our refrigerator! We always recommend using locally produced honey, just like for people!
When it comes to water, ensure you use clean water (and not from a pool!) to mix your gecko's food and mist them.
Humidity
We’re located in Arkansas, a naturally very humid environment. New Caledonia has an almost identical climate when it comes to ambient humidity and temperatures. This allows us to maintain ideal humidity levels just through misting when we feed our geckos. If you live in a drier climate, we recommend misting more to increase your ambient humidity in enclosures! From our experience, we like to let the humidity rise to around 80% right when we mist and prefer humidity to sit around 60% normally. Of course, every gecko and setup is different, so experiment a bit and find what works best for your gecko!
Cleaning
With our bin enclosures, we like to replace paper towels weekly or as necessary (some geckos are just a little bit messier than others!) Between paper towel changes, we spot clean as necessary. We recommend you thoroughly clean out all of enclosures about once per month, and that seems to work perfectly for almost every one of our geckos! If you find yourself with a messier than normal gecko, try cleaning more often.
We use a combination of hydrogen peroxide to wipe down the enclosure for spot cleaning and a veterinary-grade disinfectant for deep cleans in between.
If you work with a bioactive enclosure, we never fully clean out the tanks. That’s truly the beauty of swapping to bioactive! We spot clean the glass when it gets the inevitable poop or smeared food, but leave the cleanup crew (isopods) to do the dirty work.
Have more questions? Reach out to us on our Contact Page anytime!