Scientists estimate that there are somewhere on the order of 1031 bacteriophages on earth; that’s ten million trillion trillion, or a one with thirty-one zeros after it. A single teaspoon of seawater contains five times more phages than there are people in New York City. Incredibly, there are many, many more phages on earth than there are bacteria for them to infect; as abundant as bacteria are, bacterial viruses outnumber them ten to one. They cause roughly a trillion trillion infections on earth every second, and in the ocean alone, about 40 percent of all bacteria die every day as a result
...more
