Leopard gecko handling: how long to wait after a meal?
New-ish keeper, adult female, eats five or six dubia every third day. She is tame enough that she walks onto my hand, and the only time I am reliably home is the evening, which is also when she eats.
So I keep ending up with a choice between handling her on a full stomach or not handling her at all that week. How long is the actual wait, and is this a real risk or one of those rules that gets repeated because it sounds careful?
@probe_not_dial · 3h ago · 2 replies
It is real, and the mechanism is worth knowing rather than the number. Squeeze or startle a gecko with a full stomach and she can bring the meal back up. Once is messy, repeatedly is a problem, and either way she did not get the food.
The second half matters more than people expect. She digests with borrowed heat, which is why she goes to the warm side after eating. Your hand is 20C-something and the room is cooler than her warm spot, so lifting her out mid-digestion is not just stress, it stops the process she went over there to do.
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@scoop_from_below · 3h ago
So the wait is until she is off the warm side and moving about again, rather than a fixed number of hours?
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