One dropped bag of Cheetos for man, one giant ecosystem disruptor for tiny animals. Photo: NPS
We humans have a very large impact on the world we inhabit. That whole butterfly effect thing is real, except for the fact that a butterfly flapping its wings can create a hurricane on the other side of the world. But in a prime example of how small things can have big effects, a dropped bag of Cheetos in a National Park had an outsized impact on a tiny group of cave-dwelling creatures in the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns.
According to a post from Carlsbad Caverns National Park, a tourist dropped a bag of those delicious, nuclear orange snacks. It was likely just an accident that the snacker didn’t think too much of, but it prompted park officials to send out a quick reminder that we have very deep footprints.
“Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go,” they wrote. “…We affect the world around us in subtle ways, too. 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.”
Cheetos, as you (hopefully) know, are not natural. They’re full of processed garbage that we probably shouldn’t be eating, but because they’re so amazingly good, we do anyway. They are a corn-based snack, and the Big Room doesn’t see much corn.
“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” Carlsbad Caverns National Park explained. “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.”
Luckily, it didn’t take too long for Park Rangers to clean up the mess. After about 20 minutes — a long time considering the fact that most people can make a bag of Cheetos disappear in a blink of an eye — they had the cave mostly back to its natural un-Cheetoed state. As I alluded to, the visitor who dropped the bag probably didn’t think they’d done anything life-changing, but to the tiny things that encountered those Cheetos, it was a big deal
“Some members of this fleeting ecosystem are cave-dwellers, but many of the microbial life and molds are not,” the Facebook post reads. “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. Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.”
