Josh Wilkie and Fabio Galarce leaned over the side of their boat and hauled up a basket full of oysters, each just an inch or two in size. Wilkie grabbed his shucking knife, popped one open and slurped down the silky meat inside.

“They’re our babies,” he said. “We’ve got 50,000 of them in the water.”

Florida’s once-thriving oyster reefs have suffered over the years, hammered by overharvesting, oil spills and other pollution, rising salinity and increasingly intense hurricanes driven by climate change. And the loss of those wild oyster reefs can actually make some climate impacts worse, since they help protect coastlines from storm surge and erosion.

But now, a small South Florida company is trying to bring them back in a surprising location. Not in Apalachicola Bay, the Panhandle waters

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