Well, I woke up this morning to one dead fish and I figured out what was going on. I'm using zeolite in this tank, it's been in there for three weeks, and I guess it reached maximum capacity and there was an ammonia spike. I couldn't detect the ammonia before but it was probably there causing these issues with my fish. So I'm trying to figure out what to do here. I don't want to stop the cycle, but obviously I don't want ammonia in my tank (I saw some gsa forming on the glass this week too...I should have realized what was happening). So here's what I did:

The filter used to have first a sponge, then biomedia, then zeolite. What I did was remove the biomedia and put it in the tank itself (there might be some bacteria on that and I don't want to remove it). So now I have sponge, old zeolite, new zeolite. This way hopefully the bacteria that has already formed on the old zeolite will be able to continue to grow. Does this make sense?

I also did my regular 50% water change which brought the ammonia near 0 again. Nitrites were up last week but have dropped now so I know it is cycling somewhere.

I forgot to mention, I'm going to start dosing only 1x/week for a while and see how that goes. If my hygros keep growing at the rate they are, hopefully I will have a well planted tank within a few months. I had to pay over $50 for what you see there and they didn't even bring in half of the stuff I asked them to bring in. Frustrating.