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Hi Damien, sorry to hijack the title of your previous thread Though, this title is perfect for those pictures: I have set a tank with the water and soil of the creek, and this time it seems to work. Water is KH: 0, TDS : 30. The one at the bottom is pregnant. This did happen in the tank , and I also have shrimplets. Sorry for quality of pictures, they are from a phone. That being said, these critters leave me perplex: I caught them in the wild, but they really look like the Hue bee (aka Princess Bee)...

My two cents on the matter would be that you would struggle to find a truly inert river gravel, especially if it has come from an area with any sort of igneous rock. I would think that the natural instability of a lot of the minerals in granitic rocks would contribute to TDS rises, could be a neat little experiment to figure out which particular rocks were responsible.

Interesting that you have issues with inert river gravel Will as I am having the same issue of rising TDS in a river gravel tank. It's only about 60 points a week but it still is an issue - my other tanks treated the same way stay reasonably stable with only a very small or no rise over the week . I have had issues with Pisces gold sand as well even after being assured it was inert and their black gravel - forgot the name - but again the company assured me it was inert. I never left the Pisces in the tanks for more than a month so don't know long term effects but it was a very expensive exercise. It looked great though I must admit but just not worth the risk with the shrimp unfortunately. I'm not sure what I will do about the river gravel at the moment weekly water changes keep it manageable but long term I think I will be going back to buffering substrates. I am only trialling the gravels in my Tiger tank and yellow Neos but can't see any difference in their colour or behaviour to when they were in lower ph tanks .