My First Aquarium: 10 Liters That Changed Everything

February 18, 2025

This was the beginning.

A small 10-liter aquarium.
Two tiny crabs.
No plan, no long-term vision, no understanding of where this could lead.

At that moment, it felt like a simple experiment. Something small and contained.
I wanted to see how it works, how water behaves in a closed space, how living creatures adapt to a glass box placed on a shelf.

I didn’t know about cycles.
I didn’t think about balance.
I definitely didn’t understand how quickly responsibility grows when something alive depends on your decisions.

The tank itself was modest: a simple glass cube, basic lighting, a few artificial plants, and a rock structure that looked impressive only because the scale was so small. Condensation on the glass, bubbles everywhere, water that never quite looked “finished”.

The crabs were the real focus.
Careful. Alert. Constantly testing their environment. Watching them was strangely calming. They reacted to movement, light, shadows. Even in such a tiny volume, they created their own routines and territories.

At the time, I thought this was the whole story.

I didn’t know that soon I would start noticing details:
how water changes overnight,
how behavior shifts after feeding,
how even small adjustments affect everything inside the tank.

I didn’t know this would lead to reading, experimenting, failing, rebuilding, and eventually creating entire systems instead of just containers with water.

But every path starts somewhere.

For me, it started here —
with 10 liters of water and two small crabs.

Everything else came later.