My New Addition: Valentini

[neilw_uk]

[pufferfreak]

Looks like it's a girl! I love valentinis . I'm going to try a pair again .

[mrgreen]

Nice, nice! I love Valentinis, too.

[pufferfreak]

Name?

[Brent]

She (assuming it IS a girl) is beautiful! -- Also a Valentini lover.

[hali]

oww we used to have one called George - lovely pic x

[pufferfreak]

I can tell it's a girl because males have the blue/orange lines radiating from the back of their eyes.

[Brent]

Cool, I never knew that.

[pufferfreak]

You learn something new everyday .

[marksrush]

She's gorgeous! They're a favorite puffer of mine, too - I have one in my reef tank, and am thinking about adding another one someday.

[Brent]

She's gorgeous! They're a favorite puffer of mine, too - I have one in my reef tank, and am thinking about adding another one someday.

Just moniter your corals in case your Valentini decides it's hungry.

[Lil' Swimz$]

She's beautiful, and fat! I want a valentini someday, and name him Cupid.

[marksrush]

Just moniter your corals in case your Valentini decides it's hungry.

The first couple of days, she picked at my cabbage leather a tiny bit, but pretty much negligible damage. I think she might be responsible for two yellow polyps' sudden disappearance from the tank, I think she might've eaten two very tiny mushrooms of some kind, and of course any sort of feather duster worm or other invertebrate that rides in on a piece of live rock gets eaten within 24 hours, but as a whole she's been very uninterested in my corals. She shares the tank with a small yellow watchman, who is wary of her but slowly, over the months, is getting less paranoid of her and not so afraid to come out away from her hole and snag a bit of food.

I love Lu-lu, , but frankly, looking back, I wouldn't do it again. I don't at all regret getting her, it's just that I wish I'd put her in a FOWLR tank because both of these fish have to be fed, which of course means you're introducing a lot of nutrients into the water during feeding time. I do have a cleanup crew consisting of a few red-legged hermits (usually missing a leg or two), a turbo snail, and part of at least one emerald crab (Lu-lu likes crab legs), but still, I'd rather not have to be introducing such a large amount of biological matter into the system. I don't have a protein skimmer on it, and it could definitely use one even though it's just a 20 gallon, but I probably wouldn't need one if I didn't have animal-eating fish in the tank. Having her in there keeps me from having some cool shrimp and, eventually, clams, so I think I'm going to move her to a bigger tank sooner or later, and see if I can find a few more females and a male to make a nice little school. That way, I could do some cooler things with my little reef setup.