BoRabb Williams tagged me in a photo of catching blue catfish Sunday from Braidwood Lake.

What I enjoyed is the view it gave of the straight anal fin on the blue, one of the easier ways to distinguish a blue from a channel catfish.

I could have used this photo for my column last Wednesday. Click here to read that column on the possibility of blue/channel hybrids and the surprises of channels on Lake Michigan.

I forwarded Williams’ photo to regional fisheries administrator Rob Miller and he responded:

Hi Dale: Yes, I’d say that’s a good example of what they look like. Although the angler has part of the anal fin under his hand, you can still see that it’s longer than that of a channel catfish. It’s also straighter across the edge as opposed to a channel cat which tends to arc outward. Coloration is generally not a good characteristic to go by but if you had a blue and a channel side by side you’d see a difference. Rob

While we’re on that column from last week, Pete Lamar emailed last week with a clarification on the possibility of different hybrids among Illinois’ three common catfish.

I just read your column this morning-FOtW to be exact, the catfish from the DuPage-and had a similar situation years ago. I’ve caught plenty of channel cats on the fly, but never a flathead or blue, in spite of trying, most often at LaSalle. But I did get one off the end of the center dike at LaSalle that I assume to have been a channel/flathead hybrid. It had the forked tail of a channel but the flat head and mottled coloring of a flathead. I know that they are different genera and that makes hybridization less likely, but not impossible: for example, male brook trout (genus Salvelinus) can breed with female browns (genus Salmo) to produce tiger trout; it’s common enough in some southwestern Wisconsin streams.

Hybrids are odd things. I did not mean to imply that blues or channels could not form hybrids with flatheads, just far less likely than the possibility of blue-channel hybrids.