On 3–9 November 2013 the 9th World Sponge Conference was held in Fremantle, Western Australia under the theme ‘New Frontiers in Sponge Science’. The 186 participants were greeted with a banner tethered to the statue of Eliza in the Swan River (Figure 1A; list of participants available in Appendix 1). The conference then started with a Welcome to Country ceremony and an icebreaker function at the Western Australian Maritime Museum on Sunday (Figure 1B), followed by 4 days of conference programme at the Esplanade Hotel with 229 presentations (104 full talks, 17 speed talks, 108 posters; Figure 1C–F), a choice of field trips on Friday and a sponge classification workshop at the University of Western Australia on Saturday (Figure 1G). This was the second time that the international forum of sponge science convened in Australia, after the 5th International Sponge Symposium was held in Brisbane (Hooper, 1999). Inviting delegates to Fremantle in Western Australia offered access to a diverse mix of history, culture, restaurants and nightlife, with everything within walking distance, and buses, trains and ferries connecting to Perth City. The other reason for meeting in Western Australia was the high potential for exchange between the various sectors of science, academia, application-uptake, industries and commercial use, policy making and regulation. As a consequence, on the first day of the conference one session was dedicated to presentations in the context of industrial activities, fisheries, monitoring and managing sponge habitats (Appendix 2). On the last day of the conference two sessions were given to biotechnology presentations (Appendix 2). Other sessions covered general ecology, phylogeny, symbioses, taxonomy and population biology (sequence according to number of oral presentations; Appendix 2). The programme and the book of abstracts, as well as a media release can be found on the event webpage (Sponge Conference Committee, 2012), and additional accounts were given by Marshall (2013); Mazard (2013) and Schönberg (2014).