It is becoming increasingly clear that viruses are diverse, abundant, and mediate many important interactions in ecological communities, from controlling harmful algal blooms to causing declines in rare or endangered species. It is generally thought that virus population growth depends on random contacts between viruses and their hosts. It is often unclear, however, how sufficient contacts are made between viruses and their specific hosts to generate spikes in viral abundance. Here we show that copepods can bring viruses and their hosts into contact during the predation process. Specifically, we have shown that predation of the protist Paramecium bursaria (hereafter, Paramecium) by copepods can spur growth in chlorovirus populations. The data indicate that copepods foraging on Paramecium can induce a >100x increase in the number of infectious chloroviruses relative to controls in less than one day. This process can be seen as an ecological “catalyst” in which predation increases contacts between chloroviruses and their hosts, zoochlorellae (endosymbiotic algae that live within Paramecium), thereby facilitating viral population growth. The mechanism is either messy feeding, which releases zoochlorellae into the water where they can come into contact with viruses, and/or increased contact between viruses and zoochlorellae in the copepod’s gut. Our results indicate that virus activation is facilitated by the physical act of predation and that predators with relatively small mouth parts cause messy feeding; whereas, predators with relatively large mouth parts engulf the prey whole with subsequent prey disruption in the digestive tract of the predator. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that virus populations are catalyzed by a predator-prey mechanism; however, food web systems are replete with similar symbiotic organisms and we suspect this to be a general phenomena in virus blooming by reducing barriers between the virus and its host.