Lugarti Premium Gecko Diet, Head to Head Against Repashy

Lugarti contacted me and sent two bags of their gecko diet to test free of charge: dragon fruit and guava. I went through the packaging and ingredients, mixed both, then fed one against Repashy Classic, my staple crested gecko diet, to see which my baby geckos preferred.

Packaging and ingredients

The front says in big letters that the diets are made with dubia roaches. Most diet makers use black soldier fly larvae as the insect protein. Dubia roaches are expensive to buy, raise and breed, so it surprised me. I like it though: if it were feasible for a collection my size, dubia roaches would be my feeder insect of choice.

Guava and dragon fruit are new flavors to me, which is a plus when you add a diet to a rotation.

The back says 20 percent insects and 60 percent fruit. That tells me there isn't much filler. Geckos need insects and fruit, and the rest should be things like vitamins and probiotics.

Two ingredients stood out:

• Bee pollen. It became popular about four or five years ago as an additive to get picky geckos eating. It's very healthy. I use honey for picky geckos and think it probably works a little better.
• Dried whole egg. Diets use either whole egg or egg white only. Whole egg gives a higher fat content, which I like for breeding females laying all season and for growing babies. It also gives a smoother, creamier texture, and texture makes a big difference to palatability. Grainy diets that don't mix well don't get a good feeding response.

The powder

The guava powder is bright pink, with a mild fruit smell and an earthy insect smell. The dragon fruit is an even brighter pink, almost purple, with the same kind of smell. Both are very fine, almost like talcum powder. Getting an insect diet that fine is hard, and they did it well. Both mixed up smoothly; each needed a little more powder than I first put in.

The head-to-head test

I fed 30 baby gecko cages two dishes each overnight: Repashy and Lugarti dragon fruit. In the morning, I counted the dishes with food clearly missing.

• Repashy: 19 of 30 eaten from.
• Lugarti dragon fruit: 13 of 30 eaten from.

That might look like a win for Repashy, but I see it as a strong result for Lugarti. Repashy is a food these geckos see all the time and recognize, and 13 of them still chose the new one. When I once ran this test with a diet I don't recommend, I believe the first-generation Zoo Med food, the geckos barely touched it.

I also fed the dragon fruit on its own to about 20 more geckos, and all of them seemed to eat it. My chahoua ate about half a bowl.

Verdict

An A grade, the dragon fruit especially. The ingredients look healthy and the geckos eat it, and those are the two things that matter in a diet. A super-healthy food is no use if geckos won't eat it. I'm adding it to the list of foods I'm happy to recommend. I plan to test the other flavors more, and to try it against Pangea with Insects, since that diet also contains insects.