Jellyfish diameter; the tentacles and mouth parts usually extend beyond this bell dimension. The smallest jellyfish are the peculiar creeping jellyfish in the genera "Staurocladia" and "Eleutheria", which have bell disks from to a few millimeters in diameter, with short tentacles that extend out beyond this, which these jellyfish use to move across the surface of seaweed or the bottoms of rocky pools. Many of these tiny creeping jellyfish cannot be seen in the field without a hand lens or microscope; they can reproduce asexually by fission (splitting in half). Other very small jellyfish, which have bells about one millimeter, are
Jellyfish disperse widely and is followed by a sedentary polyp phase. Jellyfish are found all over the world, from surface waters to the deep sea. Scyphozoans (the "true jellyfish") are exclusively marine, but some hydrozoans with a similar appearance live in freshwater. Large, often colorful, jellyfish are common in coastal zones worldwide. The medusae of most species are fast growing, mature within a few months and die soon after breeding, but the polyp stage, attached to the seabed, may be much more long-lived. Jellyfish have been in existence for at least 500 million years, and possibly 700 million years or more,