- "we found, and in divers places that aboundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads above the water, as for want of nets (our barge driving amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of us ever seene in any place so swimming in the water, but they are not to be caught with frying pans..."
For Native American societies that hunted and gathered food after the harvest in the Fall, access to the bay was important. It is not surprising that on his 1608 voyage up the bay and some major tributaries, John Smith saw Native American towns surrounded by pallisades of tree trunks. The competition between tribes was not always peaceful; the protein resources of the bay were worth a fight.
Despite having a river filled with seafood at the edge of their fort, the freshly-arrived English managed to starve to death in Jamestown. Later colonial Virginians made far better use of the protein in the bay. George Washington, for example, made a good profit from having his slaves seine herring in the Potomac River off the shores of Mount Vernon. He would preserve the fish in barrels with salt and sell them as food that could be carried back to Europe - or sold for the slaves in the Caribbean Islands, where most of the land was dedicated to growing sugar cane and food was imported (including much pork from Norfolk).3
The Chesapeake Bay is an "estuary" where fresh and salt water mingle together, creating a special environment that is highly productive biologically. Marine fish, species who can live in brackish water (with salinity between , and freshwater species both take advantage of the estuary. In addition, numerous plant and animal species have specialized over the centuries to thrive in the brackish water.
Salinity is the key difference between a fresh water lake/river, an estuary, and the ocean. In the Chesapeake Bay, the range of salinity varies from 35 parts per thousand at the mouth of the Bay (the saltiness of the Atlantic Ocean) to 0-.5 parts per thousand for several miles below the Fall Line. Except in droughts when river flow is diminished, freshwater can extend on the surface of the Potomac River down to Mason Neck.4
Biological productivity as well as biodiversity is high in the Chesapeake Bay. Photosynthesis in an acre of Chesapeake Bay salt marsh can easily surpass the productivity of any Virginia farm in the Shenandoah Valley.5 Humans prefer to eat corn on the cob rather than marsh grasses, of course, so few of us normally think of salt water marshes as more valuable than corn fields. We may be picky eaters, but the decaying grasses are a great food source for the tiny zooplanton in the water that we can only see with a microscope.
The decaying grasses provide the organic material at the base of the "detritus" food pyramid. Big fish eat little fish, little fish eat invetebrates, and invertebrates eat detritus - decomposing plant material with microorganisms connsuming the vegetation. The submerged grasses create especially valuable habitat - and are sensitive to pollution. The zooplankton, snails, small fish, birds, and larger fish that feed on each other in a hierarchy of life (and death) won't be there if the grasses disappear.6
The biological productivity of the bay was enhanced by the shape of the waterbody. The Chesapeake Bay is the largest of the 130 estuaries in the United States, and second only in North America to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. The Chesapeake Bay is about 200 miles long - and very shallow, averaging only 21 feet in depth (when including the tidal portion of its tributaries). There's an extraordinary amount - over 11,600 miles - of shoreline, more than the Pacific Ocean shoreline on the entire West Coast of the United States from Canada to Mexico.7
