Microbes are recently recognized as driving the energy and nutrient transformations that fuel Earth’s ecosystems in soils, oceans and humans. Where studied, viruses appear to modulate these microbial impacts in ways ranging from mortality and nutrient recycling to complete metabolic reprogramming during infection. As environmental virology strives to get a handle on the global virosphere (the diversity of viruses in nature) clear challenges are emerging where collaboration with mathematicians will be powerfully enabling. I will present a few ripe research avenues where we (environmental virologists) could use some help from mathematicians, statisticians, theorists and modelers to better understand the nanoscale (viruses) and microscale (microbes) entities that drive Earth’s ecosystems, and human health and disease.