Frequency: daily meals against an adult's easy rhythm
A hatchling tokay gecko is converting insects into body length at remarkable speed through its first year, and its feeding schedule reflects that. Young tokays should be offered food every day, in the evening when this nocturnal species wakes up hungry, and allowed to eat their fill of appropriately sized prey in one sitting. An adult, fully grown at ten to fourteen inches, runs on maintenance instead: substantial feeds every other day, or three to four times a week, is plenty, and daily feeding of a sedentary adult mostly manufactures fat. The changeover is gradual across the second year — watch the gecko's body rather than the calendar, spacing meals out as growth visibly slows.
Prey size: the between-the-eyes rule
The practical sizing rule for both stages is to offer insects no wider than the gap between the gecko's eyes, but what that means on the plate changes completely with age. For a young tokay it means small crickets, young roaches and other modest prey it can overpower and swallow without a struggle, several of them per feed. For an adult it means prey that would terrify the juvenile keeper: large dubia roaches, adult locusts, big crickets in numbers, and hornworms as a treat. Prey that is too large risks being refused or regurgitated; prey that is too small fails to fill the gecko and turns feeding into an all-evening trickle. Match the prey to the head in front of you, not to the species name.
Calcium and vitamins: growth raises the stakes
Both stages need their insects gut-loaded and dusted, but the margin for error is far thinner in a growing animal. A young tokay is laying down skeleton continuously, so calcium powder belongs on essentially every feed, with a multivitamin dust in regular rotation, because a deficiency during growth deforms bone in ways no later diet fully repairs. An adult still needs dusted prey — calcium remains part of maintenance, and breeding females draw on it heavily — but the schedule can relax into routine rather than vigilance. Keep a dish of plain calcium in the enclosure as a backstop for both stages, and make sure the UVB bulb is still within its effective life, since the whole system works together.
Appetite signals differ by stage too
A healthy young tokay hunts like it is offended by hunger: explosive strikes at tongs or at prey crossing its bark, every evening, with a growing body and a thickening tail to show for it. A sudden refusal in a juvenile is worth attention quickly, because small bodies have small reserves. Adults are allowed their moods. A grown tokay may skip feeds around shedding, during cooler spells, or when a female is carrying eggs, and a few missed meals in a heavy-bodied adult is information, not emergency. Knowing which stage's pattern you are looking at stops you panicking over an adult's fast and, more importantly, stops you shrugging at a juvenile's.
Running both stages under one roof
Many keepers end up with a juvenile growing up in the room where an adult already lives, and the two timetables blur dangerously at feeding time: the adult gets offered food too often because you are in there anyway, or the youngster gets missed because the adult was fed yesterday. Give each gecko its own explicit schedule rather than a shared habit. Writing the feeding plan for each animal as Care Teams entries in KinsLe, with the youngster's daily feeds and the adult's spaced ones ticked off separately, keeps a growing tokay on a grower's diet and a finished one on a keeper's.