Cleaning Around Some of the Smallest Geckos Kept
Mourning geckos are tiny, social, and famously escapist, so their cleaning routine is shaped by containment as much as hygiene. Adults slip through gaps that look sealed, and hatchlings are smaller still, so every cleaning session starts with a check of door seals, cable ports, and ventilation mesh, and work happens with the door opened the minimum amount for the minimum time. Many keepers clean with a second person watching the opening, or transfer the colony only for rare major rebuilds, since catching a dozen mourning geckos is a project in itself.
Daily, wash the small food cup or ledge, because these geckos eat prepared fruit-based diets that ferment and draw fruit flies exactly like day gecko food does. Remove uneaten portions rather than topping them up, and note how much disappeared; in a colony, intake is your easiest group health signal.
Surfaces, Droppings, and Substrate Sections
Every few days, wipe droppings and food smears from glass, bamboo, cork, and broad leaves with a cloth dampened in plain water. Mourning geckos live vertically and defecate where they perch, so scan the upper walls and the undersides of favoured leaves, not just the floor. Work gently and slowly, letting geckos move away along their routes rather than startling them into the gap you are working at.
Refresh the floor in sections, lifting out soiled substrate and fallen leaves that rot in the humidity. If the enclosure is bioactive, the cleanup crew handles much of the floor work, and your job becomes litter top-ups and glass care. Use no soaps or sprays inside; these geckos lick droplets and surfaces, and chemical residues in a small sealed vivarium concentrate quickly.
Eggs Are Part of the Cleaning Round
Mourning geckos reproduce without males, gluing hard-shelled eggs in pairs to hidden surfaces: behind bark, inside bamboo, under ledges, in the folds of the door seal itself. Cleaning rounds double as egg surveys, because an egg glued across a gap you need to open, or on a decor item you plan to wash, changes how that job must be done. Mark egg sites, clean around them, and never scrub or soak an item carrying eggs you intend to hatch.
Record where eggs were found and roughly when, since incubation in the enclosure is the norm for this species and hatch dates are otherwise guesswork. Also use the survey to check that no egg is laid where a door will crush it, relocating your cleaning order rather than the egg, which cannot be moved once glued without damage in most cases.
Colony Health Seen During Upkeep
With a colony, cleaning checks are census checks: count geckos if you can, look for one that is thinning while others thrive, and check toes and tail tips for retained shed, which shows readily in a misted enclosure when humidity has dipped. A gecko sitting on the floor in daylight, or one being excluded from the feeding ledge by bolder colony-mates, may need a second feeding point more than it needs medicine, but persistent weight loss or sores deserve a reptile veterinarian.
Log feeds, wipes, egg sites, and headcounts together; colony care fails by drift, not disaster. Keeping those records in KinsLe through Care Teams means any keeper can see where the eggs are, when the ledge was last washed, and whether the group's appetite is holding steady.