"Amateur" wrote in
:

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



We're not discouraged - as a matter of fact, we're planning on starting a
new 25g tank (the other one is 10g) and ONCE the cycle is complete,
having a cichlids-only tank. Will ask your advice on that later.

As for the 10g - it has a Whisper filter, the regular clip-on heater. The
water is rather hard, slightly acidic. There are plants, and a few
tetras. We moved our betta in now that the cycle is complete.

Thanks