Welcome to the hobby... Great advice is shared here... Cycling chemicals,
as pointed help a little, but they are the the greatest wonder.. I suggest,
to everyone, get the largest tank you can, water parameters stay very
consistant, and with that thier are no suprises, like a sudden re cycle
stressing out the fish and killing them off.. I am going to suggest what
also has been suggested.. Read as much material you can, as this will help
with your success in keeping, raising and enjoying the hobby. Sometimes this
seems over whelming at first when you start to do some reading ( almost like
getting a biology/science degree ). Fortuanatly now there is a lot of
information out there, and a lot of good informitive web sites.. I like the
thekrib.com ... It has a lot of resources pertaining to fish keeping, tank
cycling etc... Its a larger site and can be boring at times, but
informitive..

Happy fish keeping...

Tim...
"Amateur" wrote in message
...
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