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.”
I know you guys may think this is silly but cave ecosystems are so fragile. Yes you are damaging it by just being there but they have weighed the risk vs obligation when it comes to National Park accessibility and decided that limited guided tours were an acceptable sacrifice to enrich the lives of the general public.
This is devastating and feels terrible. Don’t take food inside a cave. Many caves have lockers outside. Don’t eat inside the cave. Keep your bag zipped until the end of the tour and carry it in front of you NOT ON YOUR BACK.
Ugh I want to slap this person who had an entirely preventable “accident” but they probably didn’t even get a ticket.
Not silly at all. People are just assholes. Somewhere along the way we have forgotten that rules are usually there for a reason.
Hard to make a generalization from this one asshole who dropped the bag. How many people have been to the caverns and not destroyed the ecosystem?
Lowest common denominator, tragedy of the commons, etc.