[Myka]

You need to know what you're doing when you pick up fish straight from the shipper's box. Lots of people kill fish doing this from ammonia burn and pH shock.

When a fish travels a long way in a bag it poops in the bag and it also respires CO2. The CO2 builds up in the bag which drops the pH and converts the ammonia from the fish poop from toxic NH3 to much less toxic NH4. Eventually the bag runs out of oxygen, but in the meantime the CO2 helps the fish. Then when the bag is opened and the CO2 is released and new air is introduced the pH rises very quickly. As soon as this happens the ammonia reverts back to toxic NH3. On top of this, the fish may suffer from pH shock if the swing is too great too quickly which can also kill the fish. So people need to be wise to this. These issues are a bigger problem with overseas shipments rather than shipments coming from elsewhere in Canada or the USA.

For me it depends what kind of fish it is. I recently picked up a small herd of Anthias and because they are finicky, stress easily, and often difficult to get eating I felt it was in the fishes' best interest if I took them straight from the box. Generally though, if I special order a fish I will try to grab it straight out of the shipper's box.

If I don't get the fish from the shipper's box then I don't really care if I pick it up the next day or a week later, but I will never buy a fish on the same day it arrived. That's really tough on the fish.