While it is understandable that the majority of research on bacteriophages involve human illness and food spoilage, there is an enormous amount of viruses that prey on bacteria in the environment that are still undiscovered. These environmental bacteriophages are very important since they can direct many significant changes in conditions of the natural world such as the flux of carbon and oxygen levels.
A study recently discovered a dozen new viruses in the Baltic Sea that barely resemble any of the known bacteria-infecting viruses. Also, the viruses were found on bacteroidetes, a phylum of bacteria that has not previously been known to host bacteriophages. Therefore it is now thought that the limited diversity of viruses in marine ecosystems is due to under sampling rather than a lack of complexity.