Tourist who dropped Cheetos in largest US cave could trigger 'world-changing' chaos, parks service warns
Gerrard Kaonga
Featured Image Credit: Carlsbad Caverns National Park/Getty/Westend61
A national park has issued a stern warning after a tourist dropped a bag of chips, arguing it could could have significant knock-on effects.
We have all heard the stories of some tourists not leaving areas a little worse than when they found it. Thankfully, this isn’t as bad as permanently defacing or destroying a pricless artifect or part of nature, but getting chewed out by a national park isn’t great either.
The Carlsbad Caverns National Park took to social media to shame a tourist for dropping a full bag of Cheetos while exploring the caves.
However, they stressed that this could have 'world-changing' implications.
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In the Facebook message, shared on September 6, the page rather poetically explained how we all share planet Earth and even the smallest of events could have bigger consequences.
In this case, not a massive big deal for humans, but rather the vast array of animals and insects that dwell within one of the caves, the so-called Big Room, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America.
The message read: “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.”
Not to mention, a complete waste of a great snack.
The warning continued: “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.
"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."
Thankfully, rangers were able to remove the ‘foreign detritus’ (their words not mine) from the cave surfaces and ultimately protect the ecosystem.
So next time you go cave exploring, keep a tight hold on all your snacks, I suppose is the lesson here.
The Facebook message closed by saying: “Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.”