Valentini Puffer

Care at a glance

Overview

Mostly peaceful and one of the more outgoing small fish in a FOWLR tank, though it can nip at the fins of slow tankmates and spar with other tobies. It's reef safe only with caution: it generally leaves stony coral alone but will pick at ornamental shrimp, snails, clams, and crabs, so treat any invertebrate in the tank as a potential meal. Offer a varied diet of mysis plus chopped shrimp and clam, with the shell left on when possible, to keep its beak in check. Handle it gently and avoid a net when you can, since like all puffers it can swallow air if stressed out of the water.

In the wild

Native to Indo-Pacific reefs from the Red Sea and East Africa to the Tuamotu Islands and north to southern Japan, usually darting among coral heads and rubble on lagoon and seaward reefs down to about 55 m. It is a small, busy fish that spends the day picking around rockwork for food, so it does well in a tank of at least 114 litres (30 US gal) with plenty of live rock offering both foraging surface and places to retreat.

Good to know

Carries the same fused, four-plate beak as its larger puffer relatives, scaled down to a body barely 11 cm long, and needs the same wear from hard foods to keep it from overgrowing. Its skin and ovaries concentrate tetrodotoxin along with smaller amounts of saxitoxin, both potent nerve toxins that make the fish unpalatable to most predators. The dark brown saddle markings across its back and sides give the species its common name and are usually enough to identify it on sight.

Did you know

It has a body double on the reef: the unrelated mimic filefish copies its saddle pattern so closely that the two are often mistaken for each other, even though the filefish carries no toxin at all and is simply borrowing the toby's fearsome reputation to stay off the menu.

Related species

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• Map puffer

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• 

  Stars-and-Stripes Puffer

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