I'll try to make a long story short here:
Several months ago I had a bad algae outbreak in one of my tanks. I pulled all the rock out of the tank and put it into some tubs to "cook"
I ran out of space so I used an extra 26G bowfront that I had lying around. After the rock cooked for about 6 weeks, I put it back into the tank.
I noticed in the meantime that my pistol shrimp was gone. I kinda dug the little guy and I was bummed out.
Fast forward to today. The 26G tank is still in the garage about half full of nasty funk. I decide to empty it out so I can store it again. I pull about 15 gallons out and I see the corpse of my little pistol shrimp through the murky water. "That's where the little bugger bought it" I say to myself.
I carefully empty some more water out because I wanted to see if it was a molt or the shrimp itself. Yup, it's the whole shrimp. Bummer. I put the cup in to scoop up it's little body and it proceeds to try to bury itself in the sand! What the heck!?!?!
I fished the little guy out and I'm drip acclimating him right now to go into my 10G tank.
The water in that bowfront was 12 kinds of nasty. You could hardly see through it because it was so scummy, there was no flow, no heat control and I tested it for fun and it was at 1.035 or so salinity. I figure it was in there for a couple months minimum.
The funny thing is that it lived through all of that trauma and now it'll probably not make it into the 10G tank.
Eric