Ambitious project aims to coax oysters back to New York waters

New York

TORRENTIAL rain poured down on the team of scientists and conservationists on Jamaica Bay as their small boat slowly towed about 85 cages packed with 36,000 oysters, a species that once blanketed New York Harbor but is now nearly extinct there.

"We are quite the sight," Casey Stokes, an environmental scientist with HDR, an engineering firm, said on Thursday as he steered the boat to a spot off Kennedy International Airport, where they would leave the oysters to grow, and hopefully, to reproduce.