A crested gecko hatchling that ignores live insects alarms new keepers, but it is one of the least worrying feeding problems in the hobby — because this species, almost uniquely among geckos, can be raised properly on a prepared diet alone. Crested geckos evolved eating soft fruit and nectar alongside insects, and the complete powdered diets made for them reproduce that balance. The real task is not persuading the hatchling to hunt; it is presenting the prepared food so a tiny, nocturnal animal actually finds and tastes it.
Start with the complete powdered diet, offered small
Mix the powdered diet fresh with water to a smooth consistency — roughly like a soft sauce that holds a peak briefly — and offer only a small quantity, about what fits in a bottle cap, in a shallow dish. Hatchlings eat minute amounts, and a large dish of drying food helps nobody: it crusts over, and you cannot tell whether anything has been taken. Fresh mixture every evening or two keeps the food palatable and makes consumption visible. Because the diet is complete, a hatchling feeding well on it is not missing out while it ignores insects; the pressure to force live food into the routine can come off entirely.
Make the first meals easy to find and taste
Placement decides more than recipe. Put the dish where the hatchling actually spends its evenings — on or near its favourite perch level, along the route it climbs — rather than on the floor of the enclosure where a small arboreal gecko may never descend. A tiny smear of the mixture on a leaf or branch edge near the dish can start the first licks, since hatchlings investigate tastes they walk through. In the morning, look for lick marks and tiny troughs in the surface of the food; those marks, plus droppings appearing in the enclosure, are your evidence of feeding for an animal that eats in the dark in pinhead quantities.
Bridges for a hatchling that ignores the dish too
If even the prepared diet goes untouched for the first nights in a new home, patience is usually the answer — hatchlings commonly refuse everything while settling. A small amount of mashed ripe fruit such as banana, fig or mango can tempt a first taste and be mixed progressively with more of the complete diet across successive nights, weaning the flavour over. Offer any live insects again later in the smallest sizes once the hatchling is established and growing; many take them readily as juveniles even after refusing as hatchlings, and the insects then become enrichment rather than a nutritional necessity.
When refusing food needs a second look
A hatchling that has not eaten anything after settling in, is losing visible condition at the tail base, or seems lethargic rather than quietly nocturnal should be checked over — look first at temperatures and cover, since a cold or exposed hatchling will not feed, and take a hatchling that continues to fade to a vet rather than escalating to force-feeding experiments. KinsLe's Care Teams keeps the small daily rhythm that hatchling feeding depends on — fresh mixture made, dish placed, lick marks checked — set as care duties to be marked off each evening, so nothing about the routine depends on one tired keeper remembering at midnight.