Bay Facts

At filter feeders, oysters can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.

There are twelve known species of shark that have been sighted in the Chesapeake Bay, with only five considered a common occurrence—smooth dogfish, sand tiger shark, sandbar shark, spiny dogfish, and bull shark.

The Bay produces about 500 million pounds of seafood per year.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed has 150 major rivers and streams, but contains more than 100,000 smaller tributaries.

In 1524, Italian Captain Giovanni da Verrazano became the first recorded European to enter the Chesapeake Bay.

A few deep troughs run along much of the Bay’s length and are believed to be remnants of the ancient Susquehanna River.

Eighty-six percent of watershed residents believe if people work together, water pollution can be fixed.

Two of the United States’ five major North Atlantic ports—Baltimore and Hampton Roads—are on the Bay.

Mallows Bay is the final resting place for more than 200 historic shipwrecks dating back to the Revolutionary War. Commonly referred to as the “Ghost Fleet” of Mallows Bay, it is the largest collection of shipwrecks in the Western Hemisphere.

The Bay and its tidal tributaries have 11,684 miles of shoreline—more than the entire U.S. west coast.

The surface area of the Bay and its tidal tributaries is approximately 4,480 square miles.

The area of the watershed is about 64,000 square miles.

There were many different tribes in the region before Europeans arrived, but the dominant group were Algonquian speakers known collectively as the Powhatan tribes.

The mouth of the Chesapeake Bay is about 12 miles wide between its northern point near Cape Charles, Virginia, and its southern point close to Cape Henry, Virginia.

The Bay is surprisingly shallow. Its average depth, including all tidal tributaries, is about 21 feet. A person who is six feet tall could wade through more than 700,000 acres of the Bay and never get his or her hat wet.

While one-third of watershed residents have volunteered their time or donated their money to a charitable organization, less than two in ten volunteers have done so for an environmental organization.

Salinity is highest at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where water from the Atlantic Ocean enters.

The Bay receives about half its water volume from the Atlantic Ocean in the form of saltwater. The other half (freshwater) drains into the Bay from the enormous 64,000-square-mile watershed.

The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village "at a big river." In 2005, Algonquian historian Blair Rudes helped dispel the widely-held belief that the name meant “great shellfish bay.”