Kodiak wrote:
Biozyme? Has anyone out there tried "Cycle" ?
The fish are now sitting on the bottom of the tank, not moving is that bad?
They are not at the surface gasping for air, is this a good sign?
Am I gonna lose my fish? Is the Nitrite spike just as bad on the fish
as the Ammo spike? Will there be permanant damage or brown blood disease
etc? I have a 0.1% salt solution, and a Huge 6" airstone with a big air
pump,
will this help? I'm gonna do another 30% water tomorrow, is there anything
else i should do?

Kodiak, why did you think you could just chuck a bunch of red devils
into a brand new tank? These "Biozyme" or "Biospira" products are just
BS gimmicks designed to take your money. It's a *lot* cheaper to buy
a liter of pure (as in no detergents or fragrances) household cleaning
ammonia and a handfull of gravel or filter media to jumpstart a proper
biofilter. Think about it: the sponges and media in your AC500's were
_barren_ of any bacteria when you threw your livestock in. You diluted
a BS product into 200+ gallons and expected the sponges to be magically
colonized with beneficial bacteria? Much easier to borrow some used
filter media or gravel and place it directly in your filter upstream
of your virgin media.

Look up "fishless cycling" in the archives.

You poisoned your fish! They may or may not recover. What a shame to
do to such an awesome fish as a red devil. I've got a show quality
specimen about 7" long in a 100 gallon tank. I never subjected him
to a toxic cocktail of ammonia and nitrite though. You don't drink out
of those yellow, kiddy wading pools right--why ask your prized fish
to put up with that?

At the very least you should have cycled your tank with some danios
instead of the cichlids you wished to keep. The red devils would have
eaten them eventually.

I admire that you did enough research to put these fish in a large
enough tank. Take my advice and make sure that your new tanks have
zero ammonia and zero nitrite before you add your cichlids in the
future.

Might I also suggest that you read:
http://www.cichlidae.com/articles/a106.html
which will give you some more info on these fish.
as will
http://www.reddevilfish.co.uk/index.htm

If your fish survive and are not too damaged, they may breed
in this tank. You'll need to manage them carefully, or expect a few
of them to meet a violent end.

Sorry if I seem like I'm ranting--but I get real tired of hearing
about people abusing their cichlids by using them to "cycle" their
tank.

You've been around in this group a while. Did you not learn anything
from this thread earlier this month?

"Our Cichlids - their short tragic history"

http://www.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=...-8&threadm=Xns
946CF2B49C689rrwi94555%4024.94.170.87&prev=/groups%3Fdq%3D%26num%3D50%26
hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26group%3Drec.aquaria.
freshwater.cichlids%26scoring%3Dd%26start%3D50

Cheers all.

Jeff Dantzler