A bag of Cheetos created a huge impact on a national park ecosystem

https://apnews.com/article/carlsbad-caverns-national-park-cheetos-04f30c48dfa7fa3deee29702e083aa56

It’s pretty simple — leave no trace. But at least one person didn’t get the message and left behind a bag of Cheetos at Carlsbad Caverns National Park during a visit earlier this summer.

A bag of Cheetos created a huge impact on a national park ecosystem

"The bag could have been there a day or two or maybe just hours, but those salty morsels of processed corn made soft by thick humidity triggered the growth of mold on the cavern floor and on nearby cave formations.

“To the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact,” the park noted in a social media post, explaining that cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organized to eat and disperse the foreign mess, essentially spreading the contamination."

9 comments

Mellow12

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You’re telling me that in the 90 years that this cave has been open to the public, no one on a tour has dropped a piece of trash inside it? I’m assuming food isn’t allowed on the tours through the cave, probably because someone did just this exact same thing.

I’m with the rest of the doom-scrollers. What a horrible human beings. What a pieces of trash, littering in our national parks, but seriously will this be the end of it? Is this article playing it up just a bit too much? Littering in my area is a fine up to $5000.00. Use the system and charge them.

Edit: “Rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico describe it as a “world-changing” event” Motherfucker someone chiseled out rock. Poured concrete for walkways and added steel handrails for fat-sweaty tourists to walk through this bitch. Where is the line for what damages this natural wonder?

Can you imagine the amount of microbes on the hand rails??

LesserAbe

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"As for the spilled Cheetos, Ward told The Associated Press that could have been avoided because the park doesn’t allow food beyond the confines of the historic underground lunchroom."

I was going to say, one of the most exciting things for me as a kid visiting 30 years ago was you could buy a candy bar while down inside the cave. If this is such a mortal threat seems like a good step to take would be closing down the concession stand!

jordanlund

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"World changing" - "for the tiny microbes and insects that call this specialized subterranean environment home."

Not for the world at large, but for the microbiome. I could see the cave critters going "ZOMG! CHEETOS!"

Tattorack

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I... Don't see the big deal at all. This is something other animals do all the bloody time. Like a bird that gets blown off-course and poops undigested seeds in someplace completely new.

I'd argue that this, is even less of an impact than seeds in birdpoop. It's a sudden and temporary bounty of food that the local creatures will make use of for a limited period of time. It might permanently change around some of the patterns of a few of the cave residents, but otherwise nothing world shattering.

Electric_Druid

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The more closed off an ecosystem is, the more volatile and prone to change it tends to be. Yeah, birds pooping seeds in an easily-accessible forest is fine, but what about organisms in the cave who may not have developed immune systems to fight foreign contaminants? It runs the same risk as when Europeans colonized America and their diseases, which they were evolved to withstand, ended up wiping out up to 90% of Native Americans.

Tattorack

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Pretty sure that's called "evolution". If the caves were so sensitive and sacred, why let people in at all? They bothered putting all that effort into making it a tourist destination, changing the landscape of the cave by adding walkways and railings. As if all that doesn't already have an impact.

ironsoap

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Yes evolution involves pressure, however the nuance here is how much pressure and how much change is happening how fast.

Unlike evolution, human can use rational thought and the scientific method to analysis and engage in and affect our environment. So we can learn from it as well as change it. Obvious perhaps, but I mentioned it as I work on a research vessel which constantly sees new unseen species of life which we don't know the value of.

Of those that have been studied one is in trials as an anticancer drug. And it's only one because the backlog of studies required is incredibly deep. Thousands at least, possibly tens of thousands. Millions if you include bacteria and virus. For ever new species we find it might take years to be fully cataloged, and then more years to be studied, before someone might find a tangential use for it.

So an unexplored cave, or an untouched lake in Antarctic is a vast wealth of potential cures, innovation, and ancient information which could change our lives. Yes we can and do put pressure on our ecosystem (and vice versa), but the Anthropocene extinction we are causing might include us if we don't leverage our ability to abstract and cognate faster then evolutionary pressure pushes us.

LowtierComputer

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Evolution takes millions of years.

Tattorack

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Evolution happens whenever there is a pressure. It doesn't have to take millions of years.