Leopard Gecko refuses to eat anything but Butterworms?

[GeckoGrace123]

My leos (male and female, both around age 6-6.5 years) have been on a staple diet of mealworms for almost their entire lifetime, and it has never been an issue and has kept them healthy. I of course would always throw in some variety at times, i.e crickets and waxworms, and they were always fine. But recently my female has refused to eat mealworms at all, and as a result has lost a scary amount of weight/tail fat to the point where the poor thing is almost pure skin and bone.. i ordered her some butterworms to try and restore some of the fat and figured perhaps she was getting tired of mealworms and needed some variety again, and of course she loves the butterworms but still refuses to eat the mealworms. I tried giving her phoenix worms to add more variety but she didn't like them (my male did not like these either). I know butterworms cannot be used as a staple because of their high fat concentration but I don't know what to do considering her current weight/condition and refusal to eat any other worm. Does anyone know what might be going on and how to fix it?

P.S: my male is still eating everything just fine, and i know that it cannot be impaction or parasites causing my female trouble considering she is still eating/passing the butterworms fine. She simply refuses to eat anything else and is struggling to gain weight/fat back.

 

[Yvonne G]

I had a box turtle like that, so I cut up the greens and veggies into very tiny pieces, then I put the worms on top of the food. When the turtle bit out for the worm she also got a bit of the good stuff. In this way she got a taste for the greens and veg and she now eats them.with no worms on top. It took a couple months.

 

[acpart]

When I was breeding leopard geckos, the ones I kept would get bored with mealworms by the time they reached adulthood. Are you trying crickets with her? How about super worms? Those are pretty easy to get and they move enough to attract most geckos.

Aliza

 

[GeckoGrace123]

When I was breeding leopard geckos, the ones I kept would get bored with mealworms by the time they reached adulthood. Are you trying crickets with her? How about super worms? Those are pretty easy to get and they move enough to attract most geckos.

Aliza

I havent gotten a chance to try crickets again with her though she did like them a lot when she was younger. Ive never tried superworms with them because ive always been afraid theyd be too big and ive heard that they can bite. Would you say they’d be safe enough to try out?

 

[RobsterSF]

I had a similar situation with my leopard gecko a few years back. We made the mistake of introducing wax worms as a treat from time to time. Our little guy love them so much he began not eating his mealworms and even trying other types of worms didn't work. If I dropped a wax worm back in the tank boom it was gone. I had to make a decision obviously to stop feeding the wax worms which of course I was tempted to still offer as the last thing I want is to see our Gecko not eating at all. What seemed like an eternity but I and he would still not eat. What I found was that if I picked up the mealworm with a pair of tweezers and put the worm on the ground (note we do not use substrate) to the left or the right of his head and moved the worm around quite a bit the motion would trigger his feeding instinct and he started to eat again. The downside to this is he will not eat out of his bowl anymore. Once upon a time we had him on substrate and his bowl was nestled down into the substrate. He was then easily able to walk up look down in the bowl see the worms and would eat them however once we moved him away from substrate he's never been able to figure out how to look into the bowl that now sits on the bottom of the tank. Even his current bowl is very very shallow and yet he will not eat from it. So now I am forced to hand feed him by holding worms or dropping them next to him in the tank. That's unfortunate however my mother loves watching our gecko eat and she's happy to feed him for us while we are away hence I do not need to worry that he is starving for week even though he has worms sitting right there in his bowl. Try moving his existing forms with some tweezers and see if you can stimulate the natural feeding response on the prey. Also if you are coating or dusting with any kind of vitamins you might try stopping that for just a short time. For whatever reason my gecko did not like the taste of his vitamins. I stopped using them for short time and he began eating again and I slowly started dusting every other worm until I was able to trick him back into eating the dusted worms.

 

[acpart]

They can get us so well trained . . .

Aliza