Alright - Valentino puffer is an alternative name for it, but it’s the same puffer. (It’s also known as the Saddle puffer, the black saddle puffer, the toby puffer, valentin’s sharpnose puffer, etc.)
I can’t find any info indicating that they’ve been captive bred before (in fact, it looks like not much research has been done on these guys since the 90's), but there is some potentially helpful info available to assist in the breeding process*. Also, they do form harems with multiple females in the wild, but I wouldn’t attempt keeping multiple in any but the largest of tanks, because the females form separate territories from each other (they're fine with the male if they're paired it seems).
It sounds like you may be off to a good start with getting them bonded/paired, so, assuming you have a male and a female, you're doing well. If you're not sure what the sexes are for each, you can find out how to sex these fish here:
The breeding section is the part to read. (It also points out that you might run into an issue with fighting among the breeding pair or the young as the young begin to settle, so you might need to be able to separate the young as they grow.)
Assuming you can successfully pair them and get them to spawn in your tank (they seem to prefer "coral rubble areas" for spawning), they should lay eggs on "filamentous algae" on the bottom the tank, and the eggs should hatch within ~3-6 days (~81-127 hours) dependent on temperature - the higher the temp (up to ~80F was tested) the faster they hatch. The adults in nature spawned between 8:00 A.M. and 3:30 P.M., so I'd guess your puffers would likely either spawn between this time, or within a few hours of the lights coming on. In contrast, the eggs tend to hatch after sunset, so don't be surprised if they don't hatch until after your lights go off. As a note here, it seems most fish avoid eating these eggs, so you shouldn't need to be too concerned about the eggs being eaten. When they hatch, the young puffers go through a long pelagic stage (they remain pelagic for ~64-113 days), and this is where you're likely to run into major issues.
Valentini puffer larvae are incredibly tiny (1.3-1.4 mm notochord length at hatching), so you need to make sure you have them in a tank where other inhabitants won't eat them/harass them to death and where the tank itself won't kill them (i.e. things like skimmers, filters, pumps, wavemakers, etc. can all kill/remove the larvae, so your tank would need to be "baby-proofed"). If you can get your tank larvae friendly** (this is part of the reason why many people have a separate grow-out tank for the larvae), the next - arguably much more difficult - step is feeding the tiny larvae. I can't find any info on what they would eat before settling (i.e. before the end of their pelagic stage), so you might need to experiment a bit (and hope that small enough, adequately nutritious enough food is available for you to provide them).
**The baby puffers of this species are about 10x smaller than adult brine shrimp, so there's a chance corals or filter feeders in the tank could pose a threat to them - to remove this and other potential threats, I'd really recommend raising them in a grow-out tank at least until they've settled.
Given how small the larvae are, I'd recommend trying and starting with the same foods they used to aquaculture the Pacific Blue Tang (Paracanthurus hepatus),
Parvocalanus crassirostris copepods
, and
Brachionus rotundiformis rotifers, but there is no guarantee this would work***, and these should be live to encourage feeding. You'd likely need to feed the larvae multiple times a day (I'd guess probably 5+ times a day, but this is just a guess) in relatively small quantities (how small depends on how many baby fish you have). After some time you'd
probably (but not guaranteed) want to transition them over the course of a few days/weeks onto live, gut-loaded Baby Brine Shrimp (BBS - Artemia salina) and other, larger foods (which you would probably still need to feed multiple times a day). When they settle (at the end of their pelagic stage) you should in theory be able to start feeding them a "normal" puffer fish diet (but again, you'd likely want to transition them over to it over a few days/weeks). If this doesn't work, you'd want try other foods for the stage at which the developmental bottleneck occurs (i.e. for the stage/time frame where the larvae die off) and see if any other food option available works.
***As a note, a decently powerful microscope is very helpful for determining if the food is being accepted/eaten by the young, and it can be helpful in determining if the food is providing adequate nutrition as well.
*The article with a ton of helpful info that I pulled from:
Larval Development, Growth and Age Determination in the Sharpnose Pufferfish Canthigaster valentini (Teleostei: Tetraodontidae) Gregory J. Stroud, Barry Goldman and William. Gladstone (Received August 23, 1985)
The link to where I accessed the article:
If you decide to try breeding them, document it and let us know how it goes. It would be awesome to see!
