[discostu]

My understanding is the spy-trawlers don't catch much fish. What'll happen from Japan's activity is that they'll make the area unable to support fish and the fish will stop coming. The ocean's big, the Pacific is almost an entire hemisphere, lots of place for fish to hide. Subsidizing might tilt the scale but eventually even that becomes too expensive. We might lose a couple of species but that too is the natural course of things, extinction happens.

[cogitator]

The ocean's big, the Pacific is almost an entire hemisphere, lots of place for fish to hide.

Most of the Pacific Ocean is "oligotrophic"; short way of saying low productivity. You have to have a base of the food chain to have a food chain. Big fish go where the food is, which is the little fish, and the little fish go where their food is, which is phytoplankton and zooplankton.

Modern technology allows the fishing industry identify the productive areas and go exactly where the fishing are going to be. Fish aren't capable of the intelligent choice of "hiding" from fishing boats.