Amano Shrimps

Hi all
Just got new tank and am about to put some fish in. 4 Danio Zebrafish. Was going to just put a few fish in at a time and build up slowly. Other fish i was going to put in were 3 Cherry Barbs, 5 Black Widow Tetras and 1 Dwarf Gourami. Hopefully if I introduce these fish over about a 12 week period it will give the tank a chance to build up a good level of biological bacteria.
 Seems that ill need some algae eaters and seeing as my tank is only 70 litres was going to put some Amano Shrimps in. I wanted to use a Bristlenose but my 60cm tank is not quite big enough.
So are the Amano shrimps good algae eaters and if so about how many will I need for this size tank?
Thanks for any advice.

Hello Sue and thanks for quick answer 
I was going to clean algae  but thought that algae eaters were necessary for any tank anyway. Plus I liked the idea of having some shrimps in the aquarium
I`m totally new to fishkeeping and have been reading about every bit of info about this new found hobby (in fact it was my daughter who wanted an aquarium but as shes fairly young I thought id do some research into it to help her but have become totally fascinated with it all!)
Fishless cycle is something I had considered but am a bit lost with it all atm, I`ll read the link you included.
About the choice of fish. I really liked the Gourami and if its going to be picked at by the Black Widows then ill re consider getting one, thing is the Black Widows would look cool in a small shoal as well aahh decisions. Anyway thanks again for advice.

The problem with nippy fish is that they are worse in a small shoal than a larger one. Fish like tetras (and danios and barbs) live in shoals of hundreds in the wild. Some species have a hierarchy within the shoal which is maintained by nipping and fighting. The dominant fish wants to stay dominant fish and the subordinate fish want to take over. When there are enough of them, this aggression is usually (but not always) confined to just their species; when there aren't enough of them, other fish in the tank are regarded as part of the shoal and they get picked on as well. These nippy fish usually need to kept in a shoal of at least 10 to keep the nipping under control.
And then there are some otherwise non-aggressive species that just can't help themselves when faced with big fins, though that's usually with fish like bettas, guppies and angelfish rather than gouramis.

Oh yeah, and fishless cycling is the way to go. You can add more fish more quickly, safe in the knowledge that they will not be subjected to raised ammonia and nitrite levels.

You can spend the time while cycling deciding on you aquascape...

One thing you could try, if you can find any - leopard danios are the same species as zebra danios so they would consider themselves as part of the same shoal. This would increase the visual variety while still having a big enough shoal. Perhaps get 4 zebras and 4 leopards?
And I've seen albino cherry barbs as my local branch of Maidenhead Aquatics, if there is one near you. They could be mixed with red cherry barbs as they are the same species.

Going over 100% in the community creator means you will have to keep on top of your water changes. If you do that, there should be no problem.

If you have an undergravel filter live plants are not recommended as the water flow through the gravel disturbs the roots. I had fake plants for years, I've only recently got into live ones. If you want to try live plants later, the best choice would be java fern or anubias (several species) because they are grown attached to decor rather than planted in the gravel. And they are fine with undergravels. And don't need strong light.

Re the pH, it depends on how hard your water is. There are two types of hardness.
General hardness, or GH, is what causes limescale in the kettle or showerhead. This is what websites mean when they say this fish needs soft water or that fish needs hard water. You can usually find the hardness of your tapwater somewhere on your water company's website.
The other hardness is carbonate hardness, or KH. Usually, if GH is high, so is KH and vice versa. KH doesn't affect the fish directly, unlike GH, but it does affect pH. Carbonate reatcs with acids to keep the pH stable. If there is a lot of carbonate in the water it is very difficult to change the pH, while with low carbonate it is easy to change the pH.
The first thing to do is look at your water company's website to see if you have hard, soft or middling water. If it is hard, adding wood probably won't have much impact on your pH.
But zebra danios are fine up to pH 8 and hard water, as are cherry barbs.

I boiled my bogwood to speed up the soaking process and remove a lot of the tanins. Just a quick tip