This dropped bag of Cheetos disrupted the ecosystem of a New Mexico cave

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Bet you didn’t know a bag of puffed cheesy corn could have this big of an effect on anything, did you?

When a recent visitor to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico dropped a bag of Cheetos inside one of the caves, losing a snack was probably an inconvenience. But to the tiny microorganisms who call the cave home, the food can be a ‘world changing’ force, park officials stressed in a post on social media last week.

Cheetos reading about the power it has to disrupt entire ecosystems:

The bagged snack created “the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” park officials said, and boy does everything go nuts when that happens:

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.

Park rangers “spent twenty minutes carefully removing the foreign detritus and molds from the cave surfaces.”

TWENTY WHOLE MINUTES.

And if they hadn’t, then WaPo wants us to know that the apocalypse would have been upon us.

‘Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the [Cheetos’] nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations,’ they continued. ‘Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues.’

See? The literal apocalypse.

…the park has struggled with visitors breaking rules before. At least 60,000 cave formations have been broken off, many probably by tourists to take home as illegal souvenirs, officials said in August.

‘A lot of folks today treat national parks like theme parks. Park officials have used the Cheetos mishap to stress, in a fun and accessible manner, how human actions are altering the natural world,’ Jut Wynne, an assistant research professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University, said in an email. ‘Careless behavior in our natural wonders have consequences.’