National Park Visitor Threw Away a Bag of Cheetos in a Cave and It Completely Wrecked the Ecosystem
In the summer of 2024, a peckish visitor sneaked a packet of Cheetos inside the Carlsbad Caverns National Park (@CarlsbadCavernsNPS), New Mexico. The park allows only plain water inside the cave but the visitor chose to ignore the rule. Before exiting the Big Room, they recklessly tossed away the bright orange packet on the cavern’s floor. Later on, when the park’s staff came across the inhospitable packet, they found that its contents had dramatically transformed the cave’s interiors- negatively. The park took to Facebook to write a post pleading with visitors to stop littering the underground wonderland.
“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,” NPS wrote in the post. They explained that the processed corn of Cheetos, softened by the humidity of the cavern, 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 and fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues.”
Typically, the “Big Room” of NPS is a magical paradise that unfolds into stunning otherworldly sights like the towering stalagmites jutting from the floor, glassy stalactites hanging daintily, and clusters of frilly cave popcorn. The room is also host to a variety of limestone formations including Hall of Giants, Bottomless Pit, Crystal Spring Dome, Dolls Theatre, and more. Formed millions of years ago when sulfuric acid dissolved into freshwater, the cavern is now visited by millions of tourists each year. However, the more irresponsible visitors step inside, the more trash they leave behind.
As a result, the staff spends days and weeks combing through the cool cavern to clean out the litter. According to the NPS, nearly 63 million tonnes of trash is left behind by over 300 million people who visit the park each year. The rubbish is often scattered all along the trail starting from the cavern to the tributaries alongside the Grand Canyon and along the lagoons in Florida. Part rangers and volunteers collect all these stowed-away scraps and dump them in rubbish bins and recycling containers. “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,” the park officials described in the Facebook post.
Even more so, sometimes the garbage sweeps include food wrappers, miscellaneous gimcracks, and even human waste. “It’s such a dark area, sometimes people don’t notice that it’s there. So they walk through it and it tracks it throughout the entire cave," Joseph Ward, a park guide, working on the “Leave no Trace” campaign, said in a statement. The “Leave No Trace” campaign urges visitors to be careful about what they leave behind while exiting the cave. “A common saying is to take only photographs and leave only footprints,” the NPS wrote in another post. The officials confess that each person may leave some impact on the cave interiors, such as an occasional trail of lint, but other impacts, such as this bag of Cheetos, were completely avoidable.
“To the owner of the snack bag, the impact is likely incidental. But to the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact,” the park officials said. “A lot of folks today treat national parks like theme parks. Park officials have used the Cheetos mishap to stress, in a fun and accessible manner, how human actions are altering the natural world,” Jut Wynne, an assistant research professor at Northern Arizona University, told The Washington Post. “Careless behavior in our natural wonders has consequences.”
For the visitor who flung away the orange packet of crisps on the cavern floor, the packet might be just a minor inconvenience they wanted to get rid of, but for the community of microorganisms residing in the cave, the packet disrupted their entire food web and survival ecosystem. Disheartened by how the pristine environment of the cave was disturbed, the park officials stressed to visitors, “Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.”