Great or small, we all leave an impact wherever we go.

How we choose to interact with others in the world we share together has this effect moment by moment.

This was the opening from an online essay written by a National Park Ranger at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.

The full essay published in September of last year quickly went viral for its vivid and surprising

description of a seemingly innocuous instance of carelessness that had occurred a few days before.

During a routine inspection of the big room, one of the largest chambers in the limestone cave system that the National Park is best known for,

a park ranger made a discovery that had begun to completely upend the fragile ecosystem on the cave floor.

Lying just past one of the designated walkways sat a partially eaten bag of Cheetos, carelessly discarded by a visitor who probably

had no idea about the shattering impact their laziness could unleash.

The leftover processed corn snacks, softened by the humidity of the cave, created a beacon

for all manner of microbial life, such as fungi and mold, while also

setting off a stampede of other cave organisms, such as spiders and cave crickets.

The puffy orange snacks were an unexpected windfall for creatures in an environment where they

must struggle to find nutrients due to the tight food

web that exists within the limestone cavern.

The remnants inside the bag became the catalyst for a temporary food web whose producers and consumers

began to spread and disperse the food all across the cave.

The foreign food was scattered in all directions and in a remarkably short amount of

time, mold, supercharged by the Cheetos, began to appear on nearby surfaces, disrupting the

delicate chemical composition of the surrounding cave formations, forever altering them in the process.

Park Rangers acted quickly, spending a good amount of time

carefully removing the detritus and mold from the surfaces around the cave and doing their best

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