How one bag of Cheetos wreaked havoc in a New Mexico cave

(CNN) — Plain water is the only thing visitors are allowed to consume inside the huge cavern at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. Cheetos are a no-go, and the recent park visitor who dropped a bag full of them created a “huge impact” on the cave’s ecosystem, the park said Friday 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 in its post about the garbage found off-trail in the Big Room.

“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.”

The park said rangers spent 20 minutes carefully removing molds and foreign debris from surfaces inside the cave, noting that while some members of the ecosystem that rose from the snacks were cave-dwellers “many of the microbial life and molds are not.”

The post called that particular impact on the cave “completely avoidable,” contrasting it with the hard-to-prevent fine trails of lint left by each visitor.

“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 urged park goers.

The park’s website says that eating and drinking anything other than plain water attracts animals into the cavern.

Carlsbad Caverns followed up its post about the Cheetos bag with a post about the “leave no trace” principle of disposing of waste properly.

“Contrary to popular belief, the cave is NOT a big trash can,” the post said, yet rangers pick up waste left behind every day.

“Sometimes this can be a gum wrapper or a tissue, other times it can unfortunately mean human waste, spit, or chewing tobacco.” Visitors are asked to make sure they don’t leave trash in the cavern and to use designated restrooms.

The Big Room at Carlsbad Caverns National Park is the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America. It is accessible via a relatively flat 1.25 mile (2 km) trail. The cavern was formed millions of years ago when sulfuric acid dissolved limestone, creating cave passages.

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