1 SISSA, via Bonomea 265, 34136, Trieste, Italy.
2 Concordia University, 1455 Avenue de Maisonneuve W. 1455 Avenue de Maisonneuve West, H4G 1M8, Montréal, Canada.
3 INFN, Sezione di Trieste, via Valerio 2, 34127, Trieste, Italy.
4 School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, Fry Building, Bristol, BS8 1UG, United Kingdom.

We first consider a deterministic gas of N solitons for the focusing nonlinear Schrödinger (FNLS) equation in the limit N?8 with a point spectrum chosen to interpolate a given spectral soliton density over a bounded domain of the complex spectral plane. We show that when the domain is a disk and the soliton density is an analytic function, then the corresponding deterministic soliton gas surprisingly yields the one-soliton solution with the point spectrum the center of the disk. We call this effect soliton shielding. We show that this behavior is robust and survives also for a stochastic soliton gas: indeed, when the N-soliton spectrum is chosen as random variables either uniformly distributed on the circle, or chosen according to the statistics of the eigenvalues of the Ginibre random matrix the phenomenon of soliton shielding persists in the limit N?8. When the domain is an ellipse, the soliton shielding reduces the spectral data to the soliton density concentrating between the foci of the ellipse. The physical solution is asymptotically steplike oscillatory, namely, the initial profile is a periodic elliptic function in the negative x direction while it vanishes exponentially fast in the opposite direction.