I'm sorry to hear of your tragic start into cichlid keeping. Bio-spira is a
great product and has saved many people starting new tanks. Where it does add
the bacteria to start a colony, it doesn't perform miracles. Even in a fully
cycled tank, which your tank was not yet fully cycled, adding too many fish at
once can cause ammonia and nitrites to spike. Other things that may have
affected your fish in addition to the deadly ammonia and nitrites may be pH
levels, abrupt changes in water temp, etc. Although you don't mention the size
of your new tank, it sounds like it's a smaller tank. Small tanks are very
difficult to maintain water parameters in. They're easily overloaded and any
changes to the water could drastically change the parameters of the entire tank.
I could top off one of my larger tanks with a gallon of ice cold water from the
tap and the temperature won't drop in the tank more than a degree. Do this in a
ten gallon tank, and you may drop the temperature ten degrees.
To make suggestions to avoid this type of disappointment in the future,
we'll need to know what size the tank, what type of filtration, and heating the
tank has and what the parameters of your water is out of the tap.
I hope you're not too discouraged.
AmateurCichlids
www.amateurcichlids.com