National Park Service Warns Visitors About Impacts of Discarded Food, Such as Cheetos, on Ecosystems

Following the littering of a bag of Cheetos at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, officials are highlighting how even seemingly small amounts of litter can have huge, detrimental impacts on fragile ecosystems.

In a post on Facebook shared on September 6, Carlsbad Caverns National Park officials explained how a single bag of Cheetos, dropped off the main trail in a section known as the Big Room, led to multiple major changes inside the cave.

“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” NPS 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.”

According to officials, it took park rangers 20 minutes to remove the debris and the mold that formed on it and the surrounding cave. This mold and fungi growth can impact the hundreds of thousands of bats that live in the cave. 

^{Bats fly from the Natural Entrance at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. Thomas Hawk / Flickr}

As The Guardian reported, these native bats have been able to avoid white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that has affected bats across North America. 

But litter can promote growth of non-native mold and fungi as well as attract other pests, like raccoons, to the cave, Forbes reported.

The Carlsbad Caverns National Park prohibits any food and drink other than water inside the cavern to avoid these impacts. But still, litter made its way into the caverns and quickly led to ecosystem changes.

“We do not know an exact length of time that the bag of chips was sitting there. We as rangers go through and sweep the entire trail every evening to make sure that everyone is out of the cave and to clean up trash along the trail,” park guide Joseph Ward told Forbes. “It could have been missed by one of the rangers but even still I do not think that the bag was there for more than a couple days.”

According to the National Park Service, around 300 million people visit park sites every year and generate around 70 million tons of trash. But not all that waste makes it to recycling or landfill. A 2022 citizen science project recorded 14,237 pieces of trash found at 44 cleanup sites in national parks over a two-month period.

“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,” officials at Carlsbad Caverns National Park said. “Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.”