Very excited to have discovered this hobby!

[JustOneMore20]

Welcome to AA! Glad you found us!

Originally Posted by neilanh

Cichlids arent brackish, so I think we're set there.

The cichlids you mentioned wouldn't go well with angelfish. If you read up on them, they can be quite aggressive and need to be kept only with other cichlids.

I assume the biowheel is all dried out now. If that's the case, I would start with all new, fresh media for the filtration.

If you want to add some "pop" to the colors in your fish, you could look into getting a second lighting fixture and using an actinic bulb. While these bulbs are really for SW use, theres no harm running them on FW tanks and they do help to pop the colors out of your fish.

I totally agree. The cichlids you are describing and African Mbuna and they have totally different attitudes and feeding needs than Angelfish. They need to be kept in a dedicated African Malawi tank.

You definitely need to get your Angels out of the 6g and a 40g is small for Mbuna. They really need atleast a 75g tank to have a good mix and cut down on aggression. There are some that would be ok in a smaller species tank, but then you wouldn't get variety.

There are many fish that you could mix with your Angels that would still be colorful. Many schooling fish would be fine and you'd have a wide variety of colors to choose from. For the bottom, Cories are fun fish that are cool to watch.

I see you already have the sand, but you may find its a bit too light colored. Light colored sand shows every piece of leftover food and waste, but it could motivate you clean it more often...haha. I know it does me.


As for how many fish you can have, people will have different opinions I'm sure. If you want to center the tank around the Angels, then you could choose 1 to 2 schools of fish (1 school of 15 or so or 2 schools of 7- and then something for the bottom, like a shoal of 10 Cories. After that, you should have some room for a Bristlenose Pleco (if you like those) or a group of Otocinclus (once the tank cycles and is stable for awhile).

Whether you put your Angels in this tank or not (assuming you still have them?) is up to you, but they can't stay in a 6g...they grow far too large for that little tank.