How A Bag Of Cheetos Sparked Chaos In Carlsbad Caverns

If you've ever paid a visit to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico then you know that there are certain rules one must abide by in order to experience the beauty of the cave.

However, it looks like someone forgot to properly dispose of their trash recently and now it's threatening the fragile ecosystem inside Carlsbad!

Staff at Carlsbad shared that a visitor left behind a bag of Cheetos in the Big Room- the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America- and warned that it could be "world changing"!

I thought that food was absolutely forbidden within the Big Room? I know they even make you throw out your gum- maybe someone forgot that memo.

What exactly happened after this chip bag was carelessly thrown in the cave? Well, the Cheetos triggered the growth of mold on the cavern floor and on nearby cave formations that were not part of its natural ecosystem:

The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi. 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. And the cycle continues.

Staff reminded everyone that no matter how small and insigificant this may seem to someone, there's still an impact.

Rangers spent twenty minutes carefully removing the foreign detritus and molds from the cave surfaces. Some members of this fleeting ecosystem are cave-dwellers, but many of the microbial life and molds are not. 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.
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 urges people not to drop any trash along the trails and to use the designated bathrooms it provides.