用鱼游泳

The menhaden, for the uninformed, is a fish — one that swims at the base of the enormous, yet fragile, pyramid of sea life. At the top of that pyramid exist whales, which, after disappearing decades earlier from New York City environs, were spotted again in 2010, just a few miles from Manhattan’s famous skyline.

Which is how, on a sunny July weekday, I find myself approaching theAmerican Princess, a whale-watching boat docked at Riis Landing on the bay side of Rockaway. The boat is here to look for whales — and so am I.

Tom Paladino, white-haired and tan, sits on the bumper of his truck in the gravel parking lot abutting the dock. He fits the image of a man who has been in the fishing business 45 years. Paladino started running whale-watching excursions on theAmerican Princesswith his partner, Frank De Santis, in 2010.

For decades it had been rare to see a whale or its primary Atlantic meal, the silvery, oily fish called menhaden. Before menhaden took over from whales as humans’ choice source of sea oil, the big marine mammals had been hunted almost to extinction. And when humans switched to menhaden and from harpoons to spotter planes and industrial fishing nets, many of the remaining whales starved. Whales eat menhaden by the thousands. If their population was rebounding, then whales, dolphins, bluefish, striped bass, and other marine life couldn’t be far behind.

“十年前，心脏到嘴巴，有越来越多的鲸鱼报道，”Paladino队长在一个纽约口音中慢慢消失的纽约口音。Paladino和De Santis谨慎乐观，并开始将人们带出，一周起初一周。乘客超过一半的时间锯鲸。到2014年 - 在Menhaden Cut Commercy Hauls捕捉到2014年 - 两年后大约20％ - Paladino说他“看到了碉堡，40英尺厚，数万。”。碉堡是粘稠和臭名愚蠢的曼哈登的许多地方名称之一。现在，De Santis将船只带出的90％，他看到鲸鱼，鲟鱼，海豹，甚至海豚。

帕拉迪诺-在南方长大的Brooklyn — remembers when in the 1960s, 100-foot-plus gray ships arrived from Reedville, Virginia, with smaller aluminum boats perched on their decks. They had been sent to capture menhaden by a company now called Omega Protein. Men in the smaller aluminum boats would position massive nets — purse seines — over pods of fish located by spotter planes and zip them up. The fish would then be loaded onto the factory ships.

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Omega Protein was one of manyso-called menhaden reduction companies operating at the time. These companies captured menhaden in great volumes and processed them into fish meal, oil, and other commodities. It took just three days to make the fish vanish for the rest of the year, says Paladino. Until there was legislation to block foreign vessels from fishing within a certain distance of the U.S. coast, he would also see Russian trawlers enter the bay in 30-boat fleets.

Paladino在60年代的喧嚣抽取和贫困人口的回忆与霍尔瓦特的大厅，这是Menhaden产业的第一个发现者飞行员。根据Bruce Franklin的书The Most Important Fish in the Sea，瓦特看到了1960年作为转折点。

That year technology — from better netting to fish pumps — enabled boats to surround and capture massive schools and suck them from the sea. Watters, who died in 2004, recounted the destruction of a school he estimated to be about five city blocks in diameter and 125 feet tall. After that the fish pods started shrinking and the population began plummeting, writes Franklin. By 1967 fisheries were catching nothing significant in the North Atlantic, according to the book.

在20世纪90年代末和2000年代初，缅因州，新泽西州，纽约和其他大西洋沿岸国家开始削减留下孟加纳工业的内容。（Omega蛋白质和其他人仍然可以捕获海湾贝纳伦 - 比他的大西洋弟兄们更小而不那么可取。）禁令作为体育渔民和环保主义者称为蓝苗这样的物种的下降，这是依赖于萎缩的梅纳哈登人口。

But the state restrictions required little sacrifice. Most of the reduction industry, which dates back to the 1860s, overfished menhaden and put themselves out of business.

Omega蛋白质，一种拥有的船只Paladino生动地记得的前兆，现在在东海岸运行最后的减少工厂。它位于弗吉尼亚州瑞边维尔，唯一允许该行业运作的大西洋国家。Omega占据东海岸的梅纳哈登赛中的80％（每年约130,000公吨，从2012年限额建立前的160,000岁以下），诱饵行业休息。

“A 45-foot tractor trailer holds 20 tons. That’s a lot of tractor trailers,” says Jim Rogers, a former Chesapeake Bay Foundation board member.

For decades Omega has been at the center of controversy over its role in depleting menhaden populations on the East Coast and in the Chesapeake Bay; the size of a healthy population of menhaden; and even the role the fish plays in the ecosystem.

Bob Vanasse — head of commercial fisheries advocacy group Saving Seafood — disputes the notion that menhaden are even threatened. He points to their robust fertility, and notes that the debate goes back more than a century. According to Vanasse, the new head of the National Marine Fisheries looked at official data as recently as November and said the current quota could be doubled without hurting the menhaden population.

Vanasse acknowledges that recreational fishermen are irritated when they see boats use purse seines and spotter planes to pull menhaden schools from the water. Hobbyists also seek out the oily schools, which attract what they are after: striped bass and other sporting species. “The purse seine goes out there and takes the whole school,” Vanasse says. But, he argues, “it’s efficient, and there’s no by-catch” — collateral damage to other marine life.

Paul Eidman, a fourth-generation fisherman aboard theAmerican Princess, is not convinced. “The reality is that Omega Protein makes nothing that can’t be replaced,” says Eidman, who represents the mid-Atlantic for a group called Menhaden Defenders. Some of Omega Protein’s products, such as an ingredient for dog food, could be easily replaced by other commodities. Technology companies are researching the development of substitutes for fish meal, another Omega Protein product, used as a feed for aquaculture. With the state’s protection, capitalism isn’t working the way it should. “There are much more attractive industries that can replace all of this,” he says.

Yet Omega Protein has thrived- 首先是私营公司，然后作为公共公司，自2017年以来，作为加拿大渔业和水产养殖集中的一部分。亚慱体育app怎么下载随着沿着大西洋沿岸的梅哈德人口被工业化捕捞量被摧毁，减少公司失业或与他人合并。Omega蛋白的双手改为几次，但幸存下来，甚至作为环保主义者和其他人都要求改变。

In 1973 oil company Zapata (founded by George H.W. Bush, who had left by then) bought what was then called Haynie Products and subsequently sold it to real estate titan Malcolm Glazer, who renamed it Omega Protein in the early 1990s. By 1997 the Glazers had acquired all but two of its competitors and took the company public.

In late 2016, while it was a listed firm, a Louisiana U.S. District Court found Omega had violated the Clean Water Act by discharging pollutants and harmful amounts of oil from its fishing boats. This was its second run-in with state justice officials in a handful of years. In June 2013, Omega Protein entered into a plea agreement with the Eastern District of Virginia to resolve a government investigation into the fishing vessels and operations of its Reedville facility. Omega Protein pleaded guilty to two felony counts under the Clean Water Act; paid a fine of $5.5 million; made a $2 million contribution to an environmental fund; and was sentenced to a three-year probation term that was originally scheduled to end in June 2016, but which was extended for two years owing to violations at the company’s Louisiana facilities.

欧米茄蛋白已被引用25次违反职业安全和健康管理规则。本公司公共事务总监Ben Landry表示，“为违反清洁水法和OSHA规则而支付了价格”。自从终止有关人员和改变人员以来，兰德里增加了更多员工。

Because Omega was a public company, its largest shareholders were passive investors that by design do not exert pressure on businesses for changes. These shareholders own everything — good and bad — in their investable universe.

Virginia politicians, unions, and the NAACP have also protected Omega Protein. Although Omega has had a succession of owners and is headquartered in Houston, its processing plant for Atlantic menhaden remains in Reedville. Reedville takes its name from the man behind one of the first reduction factories.

弗吉尼亚州是唯一一个维持渔业的唯一的渔业。兰德里指出，该公司是诺森伯兰郡最大的雇主，以及少数民族雇主。他说，许多工作的人都有很少的机会，除了旅游业。

The only control on Virginia waters is the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The organization set a cap — 51,000 metric tons — on the amount of menhaden that could be taken from the Chesapeake. “And Omega is thumbing its nose at the rule,” asserts David Sikorski, executive director of the Coastal Conservation Association Maryland. The ASMFC is set to rule at its next annual meeting on whether or not Omega Protein is complying with the cap.

2017年，违规行为赶上该公司，其股票揭示了一项证券交易委员会委员会关于子公司遵守题为口哨打击者的试用条款和保护的信息，股票下降了20％。

研究员安德烈Shepley TruValue实验室——谁se independent reports flag environmental, social, and governance factors with material impact on companies’ value — says investors who paid attention to ESG could have saved themselves from the dive in Omega Protein’s stock.

A report TruValue produced for亚博赞助欧冠shows Omega Protein’s ESG score — a proprietary rating of risk factors — dropping in 2012 and 2013 thanks to what it calls environmental and operational negligence. “Ultimately, ESG underperformance vs. its sector led to a 20 percent decline in its stock,” Shepley writes in the report.

“回到2011年的方式有一系列不同的东西表明他们的做法是疏忽的，”他说。尽管如此，该公司最大的投资者 - Blackrock和维基金顾问 - 是被动股东，没有任何关于它的东西。“这里的一个大点是没有股东参与管理的股东，”Shepley Notes。

All of the big passive players have paid a lot more attention to governance in recent years, after being criticized for not voting their shares even as their stakes in companies grew. But critics say they rarely dig into the issues faced by individual companies, particularly the small ones, relying instead on third-party advisers for guidance on voting. The low fees index funds charge don’t cover extensive research, and the funds aren’t making active decisions about their holdings. If they did, they’d be called active managers.

That’s changing. Index funds are increasingly doing independent research to determine how to vote and to uncover the major issues facing a firm or sector, and they’re holding meetings with a growing number of companies. BlackRock, Omega Protein’s largest investor when it was public, is doubling the size of its corporate governance team over the next few years. It takes what it calls an engagement-first approach and sees proxy voting as just one part of its process. State Street Global Advisors has also ratcheted up its work on governance, including a high-profile push for more diversity on boards.

Blackrock与幕后的公司与其相信长期影响其价值的问题，无论是气候变化等宏观经济趋势还是社会问题。一家拥有生产设施的公司，可能受海平面上升，因为气候温暖需要减轻这种风险。Blackrock并没有向公司提出建议，但它提出了关于管理层会计诉讼风险的问题，以支持其产品的负责任使用的步骤或计划如何改善其安全记录的措施。发言人表示，Blackrock为公司提供了改变的公司时间，然后，如果取得了很少的进展，将通过投票表达视图。它无法销售它的持股，但Blackrock认为它有更多的影响力，因为它是最终的长期股东。

The spokesman says BlackRock won’t comment publicly on any of its conversations with companies. According to proxy advisor ISS, in 2017 BlackRock always voted with the management of Omega Protein, except on “say on pay.”

After the February mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink addressed the issue of index funds investing in gun manufacturers. Many thought Fink — who said BlackRock would hold discussions with gun manufacturers — was highlighting the meetings to make a point about the moral and ethical arguments of investing in these companies. But Fink was being pragmatic. The business of gun manufacturing or retailers selling weapons — whatever an investor’s personal view — may not be viable if these companies fail to address safety and weapons access. Index funds could then make the case to use their shareholder votes to press for change. A spokesman for Dimensional declined to comment.

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“我们的市场系统不是为这些类型的投资者设计的，“Calvert Group的首席执行官John Streur说，ESG先驱。“如果股东纯粹被动，那么市场的那段就会脱离戏剧。”

But there were also active managers who owned Omega Protein. One activist manager says it looks at environmental or social issues only if they will affect the long-term value of a company it owns. It determined after researching the issues at Omega Protein, however, that it was doing nothing wrong. The manager did believe the company wasted money on an expansion into the human-nutrition business and missed an opportunity to benefit from a change in regulations.

虽然活动家公司并不是一个明显的环保主义者和其他宣传群体，但它推动了对所有股东受益的理事会的变化。经理对反对它所感受到的根深蒂固的董事会推出了一个代理竞赛，这些委员会没有能够为Omega蛋白执行战略计划的技能。两次公司单方面通过措施限制股东权利。

在代理比赛期间，经理在股票下降时，经理在其方面需要投票并达到主要指数基金。但在活动家公司的一位官员说，当涉及他们如何处理他们拥有的公司的治理和其他股东时，指数基金无法刻板态。例如，一个大型被动管理器与公司面对面遇到;有些人通常会投票管理;其他人可以根据ISS的代理顾问提出大量重量。

As index funds gain larger stakes in companies, activists have fewer natural allies. “In the past we would be able to go to management before a fight and tell them we had 40 percent of the votes in our back pocket,” says the official. But that 40 percent was made up of active managers, whose market share is dropping. “There are basic things that companies can get away with when they have lots of index holders.” Landry declined to comment on the activist fight.

And that force is growing. Assets are flowing from active into traditional market-cap-weighted index funds, but also into newer smart beta and factor-based products. Algorithms programmed to find certain characteristics pick securities to invest in, and the strategies arguably are actively managed. But it’s doubtful computer-run funds will be active in corporate governance.

Proxy advisers such as ISS and Glass Lewis have been criticized for a lack of transparency given the quiet power they wield in corporate America. But many say the companies have been upping their game and are producing more-thorough reports, which in turn sway thousands of major shareholders who vote based on their recommendations.

For now, it’s still the advocacy groups, not investors, that are most likely to push for change.

Bill Michaelcheck is both. Chief investment officer and founder of Mariner Investment Group and an avid fly fisherman, Michaelcheck helped form a group of financial executives to tackle issues surrounding menhaden.

“The power of this small company is amazing. It has a tremendous influence over the marine ecology of the entire East Coast,” says Michaelcheck. “It is hard to believe that the former institutional shareholders of Omega Protein approved of the company’s actions.”

To sports fishermen like Michaelcheck, menhaden’s recent resurgence demonstrates that small restrictions can help fish populations recover quickly. To commercial fishermen the recovering stock means that catch limits should be raised now that there are more fish in the sea.

这只是强大的大西洋国家海洋渔业委员会正在做的事情：允许商业捕获慢慢上升到历史层面。

“较少的欧米茄蛋白捕获越好。现在上升就是疯了，“汤姆圣利诺斯说，布鲁克林，在20世纪60年代看到渔业空洞的当地水域，现在在那里看到鲸鱼。“在他们将2012年限制限制之后，[欧米茄蛋白]居住。他们谋生了。一切都很好。为什么改变它？这很疯狂。当你摧毁某种物种时，如果它这样做，需要很长时间才能回来。“

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船的角吹漫长而大声地摇滚。

“在纽约市做什么驼背鲸是什么？”Marine教育家凯瑟琳的Gotham鲸鱼American Princes西向西走向大西洋。“他们饿了。他们来到Menhaden，Bunker，一条银色的鱼的长度为12英寸，致密，富含DHA和AHA。驼背每天消耗数千，并占据他们在冬季烧毁的所有弱者和脂肪。他们在加勒比地区的温暖水域中度过冬季。虽然他们在那里，但这一切都是关于再现的，而不是吃东西，“她解释道。

“Look over the starboard side; you’ll see Brooklyn. Here we are in the shadows of Manhattan— Gotham City — and we’re going to observe humpback whales in their native habitat. It’s the return of that forage fish that is bringing the whales into our area,” she says.

The captain’s voice cuts in over the speaker.

“There she blows!”