The simple answer is yes. While Blue River Diets provide a nutritionally complete diet that offers everything your gecko needs to stay healthy and grow, live food should still be offered, as it provides more than just a meal.

Regularly offering live foods to your gecko encourages natural behaviour and provides mental stimulation. In the wild, crested geckos are opportunistic feeders, hunting live prey such as insects. Offering live food stimulates their natural hunting instincts and encourages physical activity, which can promote mental stimulation, prevent boredom, and improve their overall well-being in captivity.

In addition to the mental benefits, the physical advantages of offering live food should not be overlooked. Chasing and catching live insects gives crested geckos the opportunity to exercise, helping maintain healthy muscle tone and keeping them physically active. Although Blue River Diets are complete, feeding them exclusively without the addition of live foods can result in your gecko becoming sedentary and lazy, which in turn could lead to obesity.

While Blue River Diets are formulated to meet the nutritional needs of crested geckos, offering insects such as locusts, crickets, cockroaches, or mealworms can provide additional protein, fat, and other micronutrients — which is always beneficial.

As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life. Including both Blue River Diets and live insects helps mimic your gecko’s natural feeding habits, ensuring they receive a wide range of nutrients. This also prevents dietary monotony, which could lead to picky eating or reduced interest in food over time.

Whenever you offer live insects to your geckos, we recommend that these insects are gut-loaded at least 24 hours before feeding. Gut loading is the process of feeding the insects a quality formula to fill their gut with essential nutrients, such as calcium and protein — similar to what geckos would gain from consuming wild prey. This ensures your gecko receives the highest quality insects possible. Remember that for insect eating reptiles it’s not “you are what you eat”, it’s “you are what your insects eat”.

In summary, offering live food alongside Blue River Diets ensures your crested gecko stays physically active, mentally stimulated, and nutritionally satisfied. This promotes a healthier and more balanced lifestyle, while most importantly allowing your gecko to behave as it would in its natural habitat.