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.

"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."

  • Electric_Druid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    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@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      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.