It was not something you’d see in Brooklyn every day.<\/p>\n
Cellphone video showed more than a dozen rays swimming along Newtown Creek in Greenpoint.<\/p>\n
Willis Elkins, executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance, said the group was believed to be cownose rays. A group of rays is called a “fever.”<\/p>\n
“This is really, really special,” said Elkins.<\/p>\n
Elkins said it was a rare sight to see along the waterway, which is a designated superfund site.<\/p>\n
“You have 150 years of industrial toxins that were dumped into the waterway or leached in from the shoreline,” said Elkins.<\/p>\n
But Elkins said seeing the rays in Newtown Creek was an indication that the water quality is improving.<\/p>\n
“We still have big issues,” said Elkins. “When it rains, we still get untreated sewage being discharged to all of New York City waterways. So, there’s still a lot of work to do there, but we still have made a lot of progress compared to 30 years ago.”<\/p>\n
Elkins added that in his 13 years with the alliance, he had never heard of rays swimming in Newtown Creek.<\/p>\n
“It’s really an amazing sight to see,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was not something you’d see in Brooklyn every day. Cellphone video showed more than a dozen rays…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-314871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}