Nature Protects the Bay!
Wetlands are one way that nature can protect our Bay.
A wetland is a land containing marshes or swamps. It provides a home and nutrients for any animals in the watershed.
Swamps and wetlands are large areas of water that are broken up by small islands of land and large amounts of many plants.
Plants that grow in the wetlands love getting their feet wet!( Roots).
Wetlands provide homes for fish and other wildlife, they improve water quality and protect lands from flooding.
Wetlands are very helpful in supporting the healthy waters and many wildlife of the watershed.
Wetlands also act as natural filters for water pollutants and they trap sediment that can clog rivers, streams, and lakes.
Wetlands also help to keep water fresh and can help prevent soil erosion.
Fact: many wetlands that were here two centuries ago are now gone
News Flash! Humans Can Protect Oysters!
Now days there are not a lot of reefs which leads to not a lot of oysters which leads to a lot of pollution. The reason is because oysters lay there eggs on the reefs. Local governments help oysters by putting artificial reefs into the bay and dropping baby oysters on to the reef. Because of those artificial reefs the number of oysters are going up. If you want to help the bay please do not litter, pick up trash, and sort compost, recycling, and trash. Another thing you could do to help is not to use fertilizer on your garden, the reason is that if you use fertilizer and it rains a the rain will carry the fertilizer to the bay, that can pollute the bay. This is called run off. The grade of the bay currently is a D+. That is not good.
Oysters are the Bay's Best Friend!
Here are some fun oyster facts!
An oyster is a type of shellfish that live in the Chesapeake Bay.
The lifespan of an oyster is around 20 years.
The size of an oyster is 3-14 inches.
An oyster is an invertebrate (no back bone).
Oysters eat plankton. Plankton is microscopic animals and plants that live in the Bay.
Oysters are eaten by people & dog whelks (type of snail). Dog whelks poke a hole through the oysters shell and then slurp it like a smoothie out of it's shell.
The oysters that live in the Chesapeake bay are also known as the American or Virginia oyster.
They live in brackish and salty waters from 8 to 35 feet deep.
Oysters filter 300-500 gallons of water a day because when it eats his food (it eats plankton) it also filters pollution from the water. 400 years ago there were a LOT of oysters.
Humans started harvesting oysters a lot more, now only 1 percent of that population is living today. If there are less oysters, that means that there is not a lot of filtering which is extremely bad for the bay because oysters are the most effective filter in the bay. Back then oysters would filter 18 trillion gallons of water a day (the whole Bay!). Now it would take a year to filter the whole Chesapeake Bay.