When we think about ecological and biological disruption, we tend to focus on the big picture: destroyed habitats, melting ice caps, and animal extinctions. So it’s easy to overlook how small actions can have an enormous impact on the natural world, often in ways we never notice.
A great example happened in the summer of 2023 in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in Southeastern New Mexico near the Texas border, when a park visitor dropped a bag of Cheetos in a cave. The cave, known as The Big Room, is an expansive chamber filled with stalagmites and stalactites.
How a bag of Cheetos changed a cave’s ecology
It’s disappointing that someone littered in a national park, but the rangers investigated the incident at a micro level. When food is introduced into an area cut off from the outside world, it can cause significant disturbance.
“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” the National Park Service wrote on Facebook. “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.”
“The cave has 90 to 100 percent humidity, so things get soggy pretty quickly,” park guide Ashley Parsons told National Geographic. “Life started to find a way in that area. Fungi and mold, stuff like that, started to grow around the area of impact, where the bag was. Because of that, other lifeforms—like mites, sprighairs, and other things, even cave spiders—started to congregate in that area,” Joseph C. Ward, with the National Park Service, told KCRW.
After rangers discovered the Cheetos bag, they met to decide how to clean it up. They scooped up almost all of it, and a park ranger then used a toothbrush to remove rings of mold and fungi that had grown and spread from the original Cheeto drop site. The cleanup only took around 20 minutes.
The National Park Service used the incident as a teachable moment
The Cheeto incident was a great teaching moment for the National Park Service, which wrote a reminder of the importance of leaving nature as we found it on Facebook:
“Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. How we choose to interact with others and the world we share together has its effects moment by moment. And we feel it. Here at Carlsbad Caverns, we love that we can host thousands of people in the cave each day. Incidental impacts can be difficult or impossible to prevent. Like the simple fact that every step a person takes into the cave leaves a fine trail of lint. Other impacts are completely avoidable. Like a full snack bag dropped off-trail in the Big Room. To the owner of the snack bag, the impact is likely incidental. But to the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact.”
Ultimately, people found the Cheetos bag, cleaned it up, and life in the cavern returned to normal. But the National Park Service used it as an opportunity to discuss an important issue: just because something isn’t happening on a human scale doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. “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 National Park Service concluded its Facebook post. “Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.”
