The seafood Chesapeake Bay is most known for is the blue crab. They are good to ear but it takes a lot of them to make a meal. There has been a lot of talk about cutting back the number of crabs caught because they are getting harder to catch and they are not as big as they used to be. We also have good oysters in the Bay. Fishermen harvest much less oysters than they used to.
Oysters are filter feeders.
They draw in water and filter their food from whatever is in the water. Scientists have estimated that when the Jamestown colonists came here 400 years ago there were enough oysters in the bay to filter all of the water in the bay every 2 weeks. Now there are enough to filter the water once every year. The U.S. Navy's largest base is in our area. Naval Station Norfolk is located right where the James and Elizabeth Rivers join and empty into the Chesapeake Bay.