Bay Facts

More than 1,800 vessels have met their end in Bay waters, lying broken and battered on the Bay's floor.

The Chesapeake Bay holds more than 18 trillion gallons of water.

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

Forty-six percent of watershed residents never use toxic pesticides in or around their homes. You can evaluate a pesticide’s toxicity to judge the risk in using it, or make your own non-toxic pesticide with garlic, vinegar, cooking oil and other common household items.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

The 195-mile-long Rappahannock River is the longest free flowing river in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

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

The Chesapeake Bay is home to 26 different species of submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV), including freshwater plants, estuarine plants, redhead grass, and marine species.

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.”

Legislation proposed by Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative John Sarbanes to incorporate the bay into the nation’s park system.

There are nearly 1,800 local governments in the Bay watershed, including towns, cities, counties and townships.

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

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

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.