The main everyday diet for a mourning gecko is a two-part system: prepared gecko diet on some days and micro-sized live insects on others. Mourning geckos are tiny, climbing, remarkably social lizards, all female and reproducing without males, and a single enclosure often holds a growing colony whose members span several sizes. Their wild feeding splits between licking fruit, nectar, and sap and snapping up very small insects, so the captive staple has to honour both halves at a scale of grams.
Prepared Diet in a Bottle Cap
Mix a quality powdered gecko diet to a smooth, ketchup-like consistency and serve a small amount in a bottle cap or tiny cup fixed high on the glass or a branch, where these arboreal geckos patrol. Replace it every day or two in warm rooms, because the same sweetness that attracts geckos ferments quickly and draws mould. Watch which individuals visit the cap, since in a colony the boldest females feed first and juveniles may only approach after dark. A second feeding cap at the opposite end of the enclosure is the simplest insurance that every gecko in the group eats.
Micro-Insects, Dusted, on Alternate Days
Fruit flies are the colony's most useful insect, small enough for juveniles and endlessly huntable by adults, with pinhead crickets and the tiniest roach nymphs adding variety. Dust insects appropriately before release, because the insect days carry a large share of the colony's mineral intake, especially for egg-laying females. Release prey in the evening as the geckos become active, and expect the glass and leaves to come alive with small hunters. Egg production is continuous in a healthy colony, so females in breeding condition should never be allowed to run thin: if hips start to show across several adults, add an insect day before cutting anything back.
A Colony Needs a Written Week
With numbers growing quietly through eggs hidden in bamboo tubes and leaf axils, a mourning gecko enclosure can drift from three mouths to ten while the feeding stays sized for three. A written weekly plan, diet days, insect days, and a rough headcount reviewed monthly, keeps supply matched to population. Note hatchlings when you spot them, because the smallest juveniles depend on fruit flies and springtails being present even on prepared-diet days. The social chirping and chasing at feeding time is normal colony behaviour, but persistent exclusion of one gecko from both caps deserves a second feeding zone, not patience.
When Tiny Geckos Stop Thriving
Eggs in the Bamboo Mean Mouths Are Coming
Mourning geckos glue their paired eggs inside bamboo tubes, hollow stems, and leaf axils, and each clutch found is a feeding commitment arriving within weeks. When you log a new clutch, pencil in a fruit fly culture boost for the hatching window, because hatchlings need clouds of tiny prey and prepared diet available from their first night. A colony whose breeding is tracked is a colony whose food supply is never caught short by its own success. A mourning gecko that stops visiting the diet cap, loses tail plumpness, or develops a soft, rubbery jaw needs prompt reptile-vet attention, and in a colony, check whether several animals are affected at once. Bring the weekly feeding plan and your headcount notes, because colony-level problems are usually ration or supplement problems. Recording that plan in KinsLe Care Teams keeps the alternating schedule intact when someone else feeds the colony.