Riems is an island in the southwestern part of the Bay of Greifswald, a broad, shallow embayment of the Baltic Sea between the German mainland and the island of Rügen. Riems belongs administratively to the urban district of Greifswald, but is an exclave. Riemserort is municipally part of Riems, but lies opposite the island on the mainland. Geography The island of Riems measures about 1,250 metres from east to west, and is about 300 metres across at its widest point. Since the early 1970s, it has been connected to the mainland by a 500m long causeway. It has, therefore, been an artificial peninsula for more than 30 years. Before the causeway, a cable car used to transport goods to the mainland. The cable car has now gone, but the ruins of its pylon foundations are still visible. Because the lack of fresh water to the Gristower Wiek resulted in oxygen depletion in the shallow bay, in the autumn of 2007 a 30-metre-long section of the causeway to the island was opened and bridged to allow fresh water to pass. Fauna Riems is an important resting and moulting area for waterbirds. The Fahrenbrink Peninsula Nature Reserve () is a recognized reserve. Approximately 15 percent of the northern European waterfowl population spend their winter in the area of the Bay of Greifswald and the Strelasund. It has therefore been declared a European bird reserve. History Riems has been inhabited since prehistoric times as Stone Age and Slavic archaeological finds demonstrate. The island later belonged, together with the adjacent village of Gristow, to the family of Dotenberg. Between 1375 and 1382, Riems and Gristow became the possession of the city of Greifswald, which leased the then uninhabited island out as pasture land. After 1820, the city built a homestead but sold it back to its previous tenant in 1883. Riems is home to the oldest virological research institution in the world, now called the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, which was built by Friedrich Loeffler in 1910. Loeffler, a professor at the University of Greifswald, ran filtration tests in 1898 and found that the cause of foot-and-mouth disease was not a bacterium, but a previously unknown class he called "the smallest of all organisms". He had determined it to be a virus. After investigations showed that Loeffler had inadvertently infected the whole region of Greifswald with foot-and-mouth disease he moved to the safer location of