I would say quarantine all fish no matter where you buy/sell/trade them from PERIOD. The price of not quarantining exceeds the price of doing so when you have to replace your fish because of one purchase or trade with a friend, fellow hobbyist, whatever the case... if you swap fish with your friend and either your or their tank gets ich how's that gonna make you feel? (speaking from experience here.) All fish should be quarantined. I've surfed a lot of stores in WA and OR and seen ich in almost all of them on one occasion or another... The price of quarantine is less than replacing your currently owned fish. If the store had ich last week it probably has it this week too.
I bought a fish from Petco once, a clown that they got from ORA that day. Next day it had ich. Treated it with copper, it went away. Later it died from what looked like brooklynella.
I would say always hold out for healthy stock even if it costs a few more bucks, because the cost of a bottle of copper plus a test kit and salt for water changes exceeds the savings by many times over. You can get a slick little box filter and 10 gallon tank for quarantine cheapo and use some pvc pipe fittings for habitat while the fish adjusts. Whole setup should cost less than 50 bucks including salt for water changes.
One of the best things about quarantine is that you can teach the fish how to eat, and that you are it's feeder so it won't be scared. Dumped straight in the display tank it may starve from fear of your bigger bolder fish. This has been a real benefit with my anthias and grammas.
And yes I have sad memories of the fish I lost from not quarantining properly, before I learned the hard way. I think even mandarins ought to be quarantined but that is a real hard sell...
Just my 2 cents, for what it's worth.
Kate B
Oly WA
but other then that I would recimend it. But thats just me lol.
