Quote Originally Posted by z28pwr
Normally when it's the first fish I don't QT. But I try to quarantine everybody else that comes in since I've had bad luck before with some fish that looked fine but ended up with something.
You should quarantine all critters added to the main display. Many parasites live on the rocks or sand bed, and the way they get there is by the fish host. By not quaranting BEFORE they get into the main display, all you are doing is adding the problem to the tank, even though it seems it doesn't exist, i.e. it could be dormant, like a characteristic of ick. Ick has a latency period of 30 days, so just because a fish doesn't have it one month, doesn't mean it won't develop it the next. If we could add a fish and it not contaminate other fish while your display is full, why do it while it is empty?

I don't quarantine fish anymore, nor do I dip. If you keep your tank in top codition your fish can naturally fight off most problems. I do keep UVs on the tanks that I used to sell out of. The dip could have stressed the tang out too much. Don't forget this fish has been moved a bunch of times before you actually received it.
Keeping your tank in top condition is also the idea of preventative maintenance. If the problem has a potential to arise, IT WILL. Just because your tank is in perfect running order, doesn't mean that your fish won't get stressed by some other fish or incident that happens due to power or mechanical failure, and as we all know, stress brings about death and disease because it lowers our immune system's ability to fight back, and this is the same for fish.

Also, UV sterilizers IMO aren't the best at fighting anything since in reality it actually can be causing more harm than good. UV is used to sterilze water by destroying bacteria. Unfortunately, UV can only pass through a max of so many microns before it becomes inaffective. Depending on the clarity of your water, the amount of routine maintenance you perform on your sterilzer to keep the tubes clean and the strength of water flow and light, the UV waves can actually be causing the bateria to become "mutated" on a genetic level. This will either make the bad harmless or the good a major issue. Or if lucky, nothing with change at all. Personally, that is not something I would like to risk in my tank, let alone out in the real world, that is why UV sterilization is not in common practice for mass sterilizations.