sickly labs
just a question....do you use ALL ro water? if you do, that could be your problem. I am far from an expert on africans, but here goes...they come from hard, alkaline waters....personally, i can't think of any reason to use ro water at all with them,although i may be wrong, if you have hard tap water, they will be so excited! maybe if you have just liquid rock coming out of there, maybe you would need a little ro water, but i would watch the levels closely. Have you measured your carbonate and general hardness? The way I understand it is the ro water functions as sort of a sponge--it soaks up minerals and such from the fish, guess it is maybe akin to osmosis at it's best...so anyways, your fish can't sustain the levels they already have, much less gain anything from the water.IIRC correctly, most africans are comfy in the range of 8-8.5. If what you have are yellow lab cichlids, their natural environment would be lake malawi in africa--extremely large-yellow labs only occupy a small portion from what i have read on the net--- at least by my little standards. I know they do sell african cichlid salts, but i don't use them so i can't tell you much about that aspect, but they should be sufficient. As you are new to fishkeeping, cichlids can be a challenge, but they are so interesting! My suggestion would be to get some test kits and check your alkalinity (kh) and your general hardness (gh) and go from there. There is a lot of good info on the net about the malawi cichlids.If you don't already have it, but I suspect you do, get a pH kit while you are there. You may have some disputes going on, but you should see injuries on some fish to indicate if you have a bully. Yellow labs are supposed to be a more docile african...of course individuals will vary just as we ppl do. I suspect your fish are just very stressed by their current water parameters and after you check all of those and get your salts and all back in, i think you will have much better luck! sounds like you really are putting the effort into doing your best, so you should be fine. If you do make changes to your current water, make sure you do it slowly to let them adjust to the new conditions as they have tried their best to acclimate to the opposite...I would go verrrrry slowly, but i am pretty paranoid. Food for thought--powerheads are excellent, you would probably benefit by having the extra surface movement for that many fish as well. I have two powerful ones on my 90g in addition to their filter..can't tell you how much or how many, don't know what the labs would be comfortable with ...you can probably find that out by doing a search in usenet for labs + powerheads in some of the related groups...Best wishes!