The word "polyp" is correct and usable in written English.
It is a noun and can refer to a usually inanimate object, such as a small coral or jellyfish, or to a medical condition related to the growth of tissue in the body. For example, you could use the sentence "The doctor said I have a polyp in my nose that needs to be surgically removed."
Some individual fish exceed two metres in size and weigh a couple of hundred kilograms; both the size and number of the fish interfere with Japanese fishermen.Many species of jellyfish spend the early part of their life as a polyp (like an anemone or coral) on the ocean floor, which can survive harsh conditions.
But Google's effort, in scale and ambition, is off the charts.In this section Not bound by anything The power of neutrality Small state seeks new history Not just a pretty polyp Point man Reprints Related items Monitor: Displays to keep an eye onMar 8th 2007As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise.
The diminutive reef-builders gave us oxygen to breathe, cooled the atmosphere down to a clement level and went on to build the only biological structure that is visible from space the Great Barrier Reef.But the symbiosis between a coral polyp and its resident algae is not glorious, says Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London and a well-known populariser of science.
Not at all: "a self-contained polyp" that had "begun to develop a few cancer cells" had been removed from him.Such sunny nonchalance summed him up.
The polyp is tiny and inconspicuous.
But jellyfish spawn daily in certain conditions, and once they are chopped up the reproductive process is at least halted, so a one-off release of sperm, eggs and polyps may be preferable.
Some scientists point out that chopping up jellyfish could increase the problem by releasing sperm and eggs (which can thus meet and fertilise), and even embryonic jellyfish called polyps that grow inside adults.
But it was only once he had actually set foot on an atoll that he was struck by his epiphany: coral islands had been grown by "insects" (as polyps were then known), not built by God.
The most serious threat to the reef is not agricultural run-off (which warms the water and increases its nutrient level, so that the coral gets choked by algae and dies), but a nasty starfish called the crown of thorns, originally imported in the ballast tanks of foreign vessels, which devours coral polyps.
When the conditions are right, the polyps switch into jellyfish-production mode and bud off massive numbers of baby jellyfish.Overfishing may cause blooms: some fish eat baby jellyfish, and some, like herring, compete with jellyfish for the same zooplankton food.
