Freshwater sponges are the pinnacle of the weird and wonderful. As a basal animal that most people don’t even know exists, the freshwater sponges remain relatively understudied. The goal of this project is to survey, collect, and identify freshwater sponges within the Great Lakes region. Successful completion of the project will generate new occurrence records of at least 100 Michigan waterways. Our data will be compared the only other study of its kind conducted 87 years ago.