Plain water is the only beverage allowed for visitors to drink in the massive cavern at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. Cheetos are banned, and the recent park visitor who dropped a bag full of them had a “huge impact” on the cave’s ecosystem, park rangers said in a Facebook post Friday.
“On a human scale, a spilled snack bag may seem insignificant, but to cave life, it can change the world,” the park said in its post about the trash found off-trail in the Great Hall.
“The transformed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment for microbial life and fungi. Crickets, mites, spiders and cave flies quickly organized themselves into a temporary food web, dispersing nutrients throughout the cave and surrounding formations. Molds spread higher onto nearby surfaces, fruiting, dying and stinking. And the cycle continues.”
The park said rangers spent 20 minutes carefully removing mold and foreign debris from surfaces inside the cave, noting that while some members of the ecosystem that thrived on the snacks were cave dwellers, “many forms of microbial life and mold are not.”
The article calls this particular impact on the cave “completely avoidable,” contrasting it with the fine trails of lint left by each visitor, which are difficult to prevent.
“Whether our influence is great or small, we all leave a mark wherever we go. Let us all leave the world better than we found it,” the message urged park visitors.
The park’s website states that eating and drinking anything other than plain water attracts animals to the cave.
The Great Hall at Carlsbad Caverns National Park is the largest underground hall in North America by volume. It is accessed by a relatively flat 1.2-mile trail. The cavern was formed millions of years ago when sulfuric acid dissolved limestone, creating underground passages.
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