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.”
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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.
It reminds me of the time someone dropped a camera on a skull in the ATM cave in Belize. https://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=22514 People are stupid…
(And for the record, the skull was not fixed when I visited the cave in ~2014, despite what the article said. Hopefully they fixed it after that).
wow, I’d never heard of this before:
The Actun Tunichil Muknal cave or ATM - for short, may be the most prized and treasured Mayan site in Belize - and that’s because of the spectacular skeletal remains of 15 individuals that can be found there.
They are estimated to be over a thousand years old - and the most precious is the so called Crystal Maiden, the skeletal remains of a young woman.
Wikipedia has more info:
The ceramics at the site are significant partly because they are marked with “kill holes” (holes created to release spirits lurking within),[2] which indicate that they were used for ceremonial purposes. Many of the Maya artifacts and remains are completely calcified to the cave floor. One artifact, named the “Monkey Pot”, is one of just four of its type found in Central America.[3] The Maya also modified cave formations here, in some instances to create altars for the offerings, in others to create silhouettes of faces and animals or to project a shadow image into the cave. The cave is extensively decorated with cave formations in the upper passages.
Sounds amazing. Maybe I’ll look for a good video walkthrough.
Reminds me of the time Lisa Simpson created life.
