Bay Facts

Half of pet owners always pick up after their pet, but one-third of pet owners seldom or never do so. Pet waste contains bacteria that can harm human health and contaminate the water we use for drinking, swimming and fishing.

Captain John Smith and his men sailed the Chesapeake Bay in a modest wooden boat called a shallop–an open wooden workboat such as a barge, dory, or rowboat that was small enough to row but also had one or two sails.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed stretches approximately 524 miles from Cooperstown, New York, to Norfolk, Virginia. It includes parts of six states—Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia—and the entire District of Columbia.

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.”

There are 6,282,718 acres of accessible green space within the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Major rivers emptying into the Bay include the James, York, Rappahannock, Potomac, Patuxent, Patapsco and Susquehanna from the west and the Pocomoke, Wicomico, Nanticoke, Choptank and Chester from the east.

The Susquehanna River is the Bay’s largest tributary, and contributes about half of the Bay’s freshwater (about 19 million gallons per minute).

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

During the winter, the Bay supports 87 species of waterbirds. Of these wintering waterbirds, 14 species rely on the Bay to serve as habitat for more than 10% of their continental populations.

The 110-mile-long Patuxent River is the longest river to flow exclusively within the borders of Maryland.

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

The Chesapeake Bay watershed contains three distinct geologic regions: the Atlantic coastal plain, the Piedmont plateau and the Appalachian province.

The Susquehanna River watershed includes nearly 50 thousand miles of rivers, streams and creeks.

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

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

There have been 10 U.S. presidents from the Chesapeake Bay watershed, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Woodrow Wilson, James Buchanan and Joe Biden.

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

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

Water temperatures in the Bay fluctuate widely throughout the year, dropping as low as 34 degrees in winter.