Small Tank Stocking

i seriously wouldnt recomend gravel or crushed coral. i put it in one of my fowlrs when i first started and you have to vaccum it, and it is jsut a huge mess. it jsut traps particles of food in there and is just overall not a good thing. id get some argonite sand to help with buffering and jsut get a few cierth snails to prevent gas buildup.
as far as fish, there's a large number of different types of fish fish that can go in there:
-any of the small gobies (neons, hector's, yellow watchman, clown, ect)
-some clowns (i wouldnt keep clarkiis, moroons, tomatos, and the other lager species)
-firefish
-damsels and chromis
-grammas
-some pseudochromis sps.
-most other fish that will stay smal, wont get too agressive,l and not swim around too much.

there are some options, but ot awnser your question, yes, you can keep two clowns and a shrimp. lol. IMO, that would be a pretty good stocking size too.

The only problem with vacuming in a marine tank is that it not only removes the wastes, but it removes a lot of the benificial micro-fuana.

And, well actually it wouldn't be easier to maintain. A sand bed preety much maintains itself (using bacterias and the micro- fauna mentioned above) and all it really needs is a few pounds of live sand each year to reset the micro-fuana's populations to prevent something going out of wack and causing the sand bed to crash.

I would recommend some LR and macro for the tank.....and no crushed coral...I had cc in mine and I sifted it all out. Just causes problems.

LR and macro are good filters for a marine tank.....chaetomorpha macro is better than the caulerpa. Cualerpa goes sexual and turns your water pea green and then you have an explosion of macro growing all over everything. Chaetomorpha won't do that.

I have a friend who has a small 10 SW and a 90 reef. All she has on the 10 is a regular HOB filter...some LR and chaeto.....the tank is doing fantastic...very simple to maintain and she has no problems with it. It has 2 chromis and a batch of inverts in it for stock.

I would recommend a 55 gallon or larger. What I found is I spend less money and time on my 55 than I did on my 20--which failed miserably when a small problem escalated to a large problem in a matter of days. I read on here somewhere, "dilution is the solution to polution."<---so true in my experience.