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 the word "fish" with its connotations of an animal with a backbone, though shellfish, cuttlefish and starfish are not vertebrates either. In scientific literature, "jelly" and "jellyfish" have been used interchangeably. Many sources refer to only scyphozoans as "true jellyfish". The term jellyfish broadly corresponds to medusae, that is, a life-cycle stage in the Medusozoa. The American evolutionary biologist Paulyn Cartwright gives the following general definition: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines jellyfish as follows: Given that jellyfish is a common name, its mapping to biological groups is inexact. Some authorities have called the comb jellies and certain salps jellyfish, though other