Dropped bag of Cheetos disrupted a whole ecosystem, national park officials explain

Did you know Cheetos can set off a chain of events that could disrupt an entire ecosystem? That’s what national park officials said in a recent Facebook post about an incident at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.

A full bag of Cheetos was discarded inside the Big Room area of the caverns. National park officials said the humidity of the cave provided a perfect environment for microbial life and fungi to form on the processed corn snack.

“Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink,” the national park said. “And the cycle continues.”

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Rangers had to spend at least 20 minutes carefully removing the foreign matter and mold from the cave’s surfaces.

“At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing,” national park officials said on Facebook, noting that the abandoned snack bag may have been incidental.

The park said there are some things, like visitors leaving a trail of lint while walking through the caverns, that are impossible to prevent. But other impacts, like the Cheetos, are avoidable.

“Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it,” the park said.

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