I just had another thought. Eventhough all catfish (including blues) tend to be far hardier than other sportfish and more adapable to all sorts of water quality, blues tend to prefer clear water. If the water is exeptionaly murky, mabie the channels were stressed by it to a lesser extent than the blues. Not that blues can't thrive well in standard pond water, but mabie that little factor can make a difference when added to the stress of being caught. who knows?
Another thing that I have noticed is that I catch blues just as often as channels when fishing with livers and stinkbaits. And it's equaly as common for me to catch channels as it is blues when fishing with crankbaits for bass. Mabie it's because they're still about 1Lb, mabie it's just strange luck or mabie I'm not keeping a close enough eye on them, but I havn't observed any noticeable difference between the predatory nature of my blues and my channels.
While I'm on the subject, I thought of someting else too (keep in mind that I'm just brainstorming here). Mabie the difference in growth rate had somthing to do with me feeding them high protien sinking feed, which the catfish all seemed to like alot. It may be that with the convenience of just swiming up to the pile of feed and sucking it down to thier hearts delight that they would allow themselves to get fuller than usual and that maibie the blues just have bigger stomachs than the channels. The high protien (45%) and high fish meal (15%) may have also been a factor. I heard alot of people say that the reason that you use 38% feed for channel cat aquaculture is that they really don't benifit much more from the higher protien feed. I have also read Bob Lusk saying that in most situations that blues and channels will have basicly the same diet, except when there is a shortage of thier prefered food channels will resort to eating vegitation and blues never will. Mabie a channel's ability to obtain nutrition from plant matter gives them a better ablility to grow well on low protien food and a blue's strictly carnivorous diet gives them a better ability to assimilate the full protien content of high protien feeds.
That ended up being alot longer than I had planned on and considering how many times I used the word "maibe" I may or may not be completly off track on all counts. but who knows?

-Scott

Take great care of it, or let someone else have it.