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This is one of those threads that I just hate to see here. I was once a newcomer to reptiles and brought in some leopard geckos (very expensive ones I might add) from a breeder that was known worldwide. It was 1999 and there was no Fauna, no GeckoForums, just a small group of people that posted on the kingsnake.com Gecko forum, and a few really crappy books. I didn't know about quarantine; I just put the half a dozen new leos in one of my racks in my gecko room. Yes, a couple of them looked thin, but I figured they just needed a couple weeks of nicely gutloaded crickets and they would be A-ok.
Within two weeks almost none of my 75 or so leopard geckos was eating, and they had lost a lot of weight and were dehydrated, no matter how much water they drank. Long story short, my husband and I sent off 6 live specimens to have full necrops and histopath done. Sure enough, all tested positive for crypto. One of the worst days of my life up until that time was the day I had to pull open each bin and remove each gecko to be euthanized. It's an awful feeling, and of course it was all my fault for not quarantining.
Not sure exactly why I tell this story except that I can empathize with Ashley. We all know how easy it is to get carried away with our herp collections; we get caught up in the excitement of it and before we know it we've added a ton of new animals to the collection.
Of course, the lesson here is we MUST practice a strict quarantine, always, no exceptions, no matter what breeder our new animal came from. I said it in another post earlier in the thread; some people are just going to have to learn the hard way about how important it is to quarantine, I was one of those people. Once it's happened you cannot change it, all you can do is take every precaution possible to make sure it never happens to you again.
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