Purchasing Sick Fish from the Pet Store

There's always a reason that they tell fish owners to have a 10 gallon quarantine tank set up. The pet stores sell a ton of sick fish. This is because the fish stores place many fish in each tank which leads to overcrowding and poor water quality. The fish you will get is going to be stressed out. If there are 200 fish in the tank and one of the fish has a disease, they will all get the disease. If you place this new fish in your tank, it will get all of your fish very sick and they will possibly die if you do not treat them as soon as possible.

Pet stores will often times sell fish that they know are sick. If they cannot tell that the fish are sick than they should not be working at the pet store. If you see any fish that are dead in the tank, that would be one sign that the fish are sick. Sometimes, moving the fish out of the tank will cause the fish to be stressed out. Once you place the fish into your aquarium it will probably get sick and if you don't treat all of the fish you will have all dead fish after about a week to a month in time.

It's very important to place your new fish into quarantine tanks. You don't want to kill all of your fish. If you purchased two fish and they are the only fish you have, then you can place them in your tank. If you already have fish, you need to place them into a different tank for at least 3 weeks to make sure that they don't show signs of illness. It might take a week or two for them to start showing signs that they are sick. Perhaps they will start to have white spots or torn fins. Bacterial infections will spread fast and you need to treat the water as well as the fish.

As you can see, you want to pay close attention to what fish you purchase from the pet store. You don't want to pick a fish out a fish tank full of thousands of fish. The odds of that fish not getting sick are slim to none. Usually, fish stores are supposed to sell fish which are not sick. Usually they will not notice or won't bother to place a sticker on the tank which says they are being quarantined. If you notice the water is really dark blue that means that the fish are being treated for Ich. Never purchase a fish out of a tank with dark blue water.