Park staff at Carlsbad Caverns National Park said a dropped bag of Cheetos in the cave known as the Big Room triggered unexpected ecological changes. Rangers found processed corn from the snack softened by the cave humidity and hosting microbes and fungi, the National Park Service wrote on Facebook.
The park said cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies assembled into a temporary food web around the spill, dispersing nutrients to nearby surfaces and formations. National Park Service material described molds spreading and the organic matter beginning to decay and smell.
Park guide Ashley Parsons told National Geographic the cave maintains extremely high moisture, adding that humidity ranges near 90 to 100 percent so items become soggy quickly. Joseph C. Ward of the National Park Service told KCRW that fungi and mold began to grow at the impact site, and small invertebrates congregated there.
Rangers met on site and removed nearly all of the snack debris. A park ranger used a toothbrush to scrub away rings of mold and fungi that had spread from the original drop site. The service said the cleanup took about 20 minutes.
Park Response And Public Message
The National Park Service posted the incident on Facebook to explain the effects of introducing food into a generally closed cave system. The agency wrote that the processed corn created a perfect environment for microbes and fungi to flourish and for invertebrates to form a temporary food web.
In its Facebook post the park emphasized that small actions can have outsized effects on cave life and formations. The agency concluded that, while a spilled snack may seem trivial from a human perspective, it can be world changing for cave organisms and ecosystems.
Rangers said people recovered the bag and removed the contamination, and that life in the cavern returned to normal after cleanup. The National Park Service used the episode as a teaching moment about impacts inside the Big Room and about leaving natural areas as they were found.
