How a single bag of smuggled Cheetos sparked a ‘world-changing’ impact in national park

Just one bag of Cheetos can be “world changing.”

A parkgoer at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico recently dropped a bag full of Cheetos at the caverns.

That one bag of the dusty orange snack made a “huge impact” on the cave’s ecosystem, the park said in a Facebook post.

“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,” the park said.

The post explained how some incidental impacts can be “difficult or impossible” to prevent, such as the fact that people walk among the caves on a regular basis, leaving a fine trail of lint — but other impacts are “completely avoidable,” such as dropping a bag of snacks.

“To the owner of the snack bag, the impact is likely incidental. But to the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact,” read the post.

“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.”

Park rangers reportedly spent 20 minutes removing the foreign debris and molds from the surfaces of the cave, explaining that while some members of the ecosystem that came from the Cheetos are cave-dwellers, “many of the microbial life and molds are not.”

“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 post concluded.

The park’s website states that food and drinks are prohibited in the cavern except for plain water as it attracts animals into cavern areas “not usually frequented by wildlife.”

Carlsbad Caverns National Park followed up the Cheetos post with a post about their Leave No Trace principle — specifically to “dispose of waste properly.”

“Contrary to popular belief, the cave is NOT a big trash can,” the post said. “Even still, rangers walk the trails at the end of every day and pick up waste left behind.”