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Can Crested Geckos Eat Bananas?

Are bananas okay for crested geckos?With crested geckos confirmed as being frugivorous or fruit-eating, speculation remains rife about the fruits that can be fed to them. Among the options that arise, bananas are often considered. Accordingly, in this post, we confirm whether crested geckos can eat bananas.

Can Crested Geckos Eat Bananas? yes, crested geckos can eat bananas. While being high in potassium bananas inhibit optimal calcium absorption into the system. However, they have numerous other nutrients that are good for your cresty. Occasionally feeding your crested gecko with bananas is the right approach to follow.

If you want to know the right way to feed your crested gecko bananas, continue to read!

Bananas do not have an Optimal Calcium to Phosphorus Ratio

The ideal ratio between calcium to phosphorus for crested geckos is 2:1, i.e. two parts of calcium to every one part of phosphorus.

In the case of bananas though, we find the inverse where one banana is estimated to have four times as much of phosphorus as calcium.

Clearly, that is far from an ideal scenario which is why bananas are not recommended as regular dietary fruits for crested geckos.

But does that mean – based on this particular criterion alone, you should avoid bananas for your crested gecko altogether?

No; as mentioned in the Introduction section above, while things may be skewed as far as this particular ratio is concerned, bananas score quite well when it comes to other nutrients.

For instance, there is a good amount of magnesium (40 milligrams+) in each banana. Bananas also have excellent amounts of vital vitamins such as Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and Vitamin E, along with Folate and trace amounts of Niacin.

How to Feed Bananas to your Crested Gecko

A common question that comes up is the form in which to feed bananas to your crested gecko. Should you mash them? Should you slice them?

As subsequent sections in this post will advise you, the ideal approach for feeding bananas to your crested gecko is to mix them with other items, be it other fruits, CGD, crickets, and more.

But if you have to feed bananas to your crested gecko in their standalone form, we recommend mashing them to a smooth pulp instead of simply slicing them.

This is because the mashed pulp will be much easier for your crested gecko to ingest than simply sliced up banana pieces.

In fact, by and large, your crested gecko will have a hard time trying to eat sliced versions of practically any fruit, so soft and pulpy forms are most desirable.

Blending Bananas with Other Fruits is a Great Approach

Given the good amounts of vital nutrients and vitamins in bananas, an excellent approach would be to blend them with other fruits.

For instance, you could mash apples, pears, and strawberries along with bananas. This way, they get an ideal mix of nutrients and other benefits offered by all of these fruits together.

We also show you what you should know about feeding strawberries and apples in these articles below:

Alongside, another approach you could consider is mixing bananas with yogurt before serving them to your crested gecko; the resultant mixture would make up for the lack of adequate calcium in bananas alone.Can crested geckos eat bananas?

Mixing CGD with Bananas

Just as you can mix bananas with yogurt and then serve them to your gecko, you can also consider adding bananas to your regular CGD and then feeding the resultant mixture to it.

For this, your regular Repashy Crested Gecko Diet would also do just fine. As has been stressed throughout this post, don’t make this a regular occurrence.

Maybe once or twice a week, you can consider adding a banana to the CGD that you have and serve the mixture to your crested gecko.

Crickets and Bananas

The moderation principle holds true with crickets as well; some crestie owners end up feeding them all too often to their beloved pets, possibly supplanting with bananas in the process.

Remember that just as bananas are not that great options when fed to your crestie very often, so are crickets. This is especially true since your crested gecko might take to crickets in a big way while ignoring other foods.

The issue with crickets in this context lies in the relatively low nutritional value that they offer. So combining crickets and bananas would not be a great combination in tandem anyway.

Instead, you can consider adding other fruits while feeding crickets to your crested gecko. You can also consider dusting crickets with CGD or other nutritional supplements to make up for their low nutritional value.

Adding Bananas to Baby Food

Many gecko owners add bananas to baby food and then serve the mixture to their cresties. This approach is fine as long as it is done moderately.

Remember that baby food does contain relatively high quantities of sugar which is not good for your crested gecko in the first place. Bananas on their own too have their own set of limitations as outlined above.

So mixing these two together is like coming up with a supra-version of individually not so desirable items.

Therefore we would recommend not taking this approach in the first place. In case you have to, do so really occasionally, maybe like a once-in-a-month treat and nothing more.

Fruits to Avoid for your Crested Gecko

While bananas are still OK for your crested gecko in moderate quantities, there are other fruits that are not OK at all! Practically all citrus fruits come in this “no go zone” for cresties since they simply cannot absorb these fruits; their digestive systems reject them.

So whether it is oranges, grapefruits, limes, lemons, raspberries, or cranberries among others, you should not feed these to your crestie at all, whether standalone or blended with any other item.

Some other fruits also come within this “no go zone” for cresties, albeit for other reasons.

Starfruits and rhubarb, for instance, have rather high levels of oxalate and should thus not be fed to your crested gecko. Likewise, potentially high persin fruits like the avocado are best avoided altogether for your crestie.

Tomatoes are fruits as well and they should not be fed to Crested geckos – here is why!

Conclusion

Ultimately, it is all about moderation whether it is us humans or adorable pet crested geckos. So an occasional banana as a treat is just fine for cresties.

At the same time, there are other fruits you might want to consider more frequently for your crestie. Apples, for instance, are more suitable for crested geckos than bananas. Papayas and mangoes too work like a charm once you start feeding them to your crested gecko.

So it is about the choice of the fruit as well as how you present that fruit to your crested gecko.

Even if we stick to bananas themselves, you need not serve them to your crested gecko as-it-is, just as we outlined earlier in the post. Instead, you can consider mixing them with other fruits, with yogurt, with CGD, with baby food (really rarely), and so on.

Once you consider all of these various possibilities, you will find your crested gecko enjoying gorging on bananas as much as you enjoy feeding them to it!

Pierre And The ReptileCraze Team
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