Dropped Cheetos bag has ‘world-changing’ impact on Carlsbad Caverns, rangers say

A forgotten bag of Cheetos left inside Carlsbad Caverns might have seemed trivial to the owner, but it had an outsize impact on the cave’s delicate environment, rangers said.

The cheesy snacks were dropped off-trail in the Big Room at the national park in New Mexico, rangers said in a Friday, Sept. 6, news release on Facebook.

A photo with the release shows a crumpled Cheetos bag on the rocky cavern floor.

“To the owner of the snack bag, the impact is likely incidental,” rangers said in the release. “But to the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact.”

“Softened by the humidity of the cave”, the corn-based snacks “formed the perfect environment” for fungi and microbial life, rangers said.

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

Rangers spent 20 minutes cleaning up the mess and removing foreign molds from the cave.

“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,” rangers warned.

The Big Room is the largest single cave chamber by volume in the United States, according to the National Park Service.

Established as a national park in 1930, Carlsbad Cavern is “one of over 300 limestone caves in a fossil reef laid down by an inland sea about 265 million years ago,” rangers said.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is about a 300-mile drive southeast from Albuquerque.

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