possible shellie and cyp tank

[nismo_sky28]

I'm thinking about converting my sons tank into a mini lake tang tank with shellies and a group of small cyps. This will be something completely new to me so I figured I would asked some recommendations. It's a 36 gallon bowfront so I would treat it as if it were a 29 gallon. I'm thinking about a small group of cyp nigrippinis and a few pair of either lamp meleagris or speciosus. Any suggestions before I dive in?

[Ron]

I would change "few" to "two", for the species you mentioned, though you could start with 6+ to get the pairs initially. N. multifasciatus and N. brevis would be options that allow you more pairs if you wanted.

IME, cyps, even the little cyps, are oddly aggressive for being "minnows". Depending on sex ratio, the tank might not be big enough long term (1+ years), but would certainly work out for a while.

[nismo_sky28]

I appreciate the info. I'll keep that in mind when I'm looking into what fish I plan on getting. If I do go with cyps and the aggression gets to be too much I might just upgrade the size of his tank. Are there any other fish that work well with shellies you would suggest?

[Ron]

It's hard to keep it within tangs and come up with more options for that tank size IMO. Most of the open water species I can recall just get too big and obviously you don't want a bottom dweller or it'll just be in conflict with the shellies for space.

Outside of tangs, tank-raised rainbows might work, one of the smaller varieties at least. That's all I can think of at the moment that would be a robust option to stay in the upper half of the tank and not grow too large.