Carlsbad Caverns Blasts 'World Changing' Cheetos Bag

"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." That's the message rangers from Carlsbad Caverns National Park offered last week, along with a photo of an abandoned Cheetos bag, in an attempt to get tourists to stop littering in the New Mexico park, reports CNN.

• Grievance: In a Friday Facebook post, the park noted the "thousands" of folks who converge on the main cave each day cause "incidental impacts" that are hard to stop from happening—for instance, "the simple fact that every step a person takes into the cave leaves a fine trail of lint."
• Offending Cheetos bag: But, per the post, "other impacts are completely avoidable. Like a full snack bag dropped off-trail in the Big Room." The park, which allows only plain water in the cave, continues that "to the owner of the snack bag, the impact is likely incidental. But to the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact."

• Explainer: How could a Cheetos bag muck things up? Well, per rangers: "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."
• More: "One way to think about it is that caves are quite extreme places to survive in the scheme of things. There's no light. Water can be limited. Nutrients are in short supply," University of New South Wales Sydney biology professor Andy Baker tells the Washington Post. "So the critters that live in caves have adapted to that environment. Add food of any kind, and that could disrupt the balance of the cave ecosystem."
• Follow-up: The park said it took rangers 20 minutes to clean up the "foreign detritus" and molds from the Cheetos bag and reemphasized on Saturday that "contrary to popular belief, the cave is NOT a big trash can." It noted that rangers clean up the park's trails at the end of each day, and that while "sometimes this can be a gum wrapper or a tissue, other times it can unfortunately mean human waste, spit, or chewing tobacco." It added: "Remember to re-create responsibly!"

(More Carlsbad Caverns stories.)