Starving the ants

During his talk on Biological Computing, Eric Bonabeau mentioned that to run experiments with ants, they need to starve them to get them to do anything. There’s a push to starve the ants, as it were, with the DMCA, the Broadcast Flag, Patriot II, plugging the analog hole and the like. At some point, this is going to result in some pretty hungry ants. What happens then?