The Third International Symposium on Fish Otolith Research and Application was held in Townsville, Queensland, Australia from 11 to 16 July 2004. The overall theme was ‘Innovation and Implementation’, a collection of which is published here (Volume 56, Issue 5). Although age and growth studies predominated at the Symposium, new areas of quality-control assurance, annual-increment formation in deep-sea and tropical fish, image analysis and two-dimensional feature extraction were demonstrated. New statistical approaches were also evident, particularly in the subsampling of commercial data for estimating age compositions. The chemical composition of otoliths as natural data loggers has greatly advanced since the 1998 Symposium, with the advent of micromilling machines, new instrumentation and the use of isotopes rather than elements as environmental indicators. Otoliths will continue to support modern environmental needs for fisheries, marine park assessment, metapopulation conservation and the management of stocks and biodiversity of fish.