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.

With the placement of an additional 12,000 oysters in the coming weeks, the team will have added nearly 50,000 adult oysters to the bay, making it the largest single installation of breeding oysters in New York City, according to the Environmental Protection Department.

The project, led by the department, is the city’s latest and largest attempt to restore a self-sustaining oyster population in Jamaica Bay in the hope of improving water quality, protecting the shoreline from erosion and reviving habitats for fish and wildlife.