• ●Both species belong to the genus Alpheus in the family Alpheidae — the pistol or snapping shrimps.
• ●The work was carried out at CUSAT's School of Industrial Fisheries, with the team including Deepak Jose, Sameera Shamsudeen, Akshay Unnikrishnan and research scholar Kaimakudam Vishnu, along with Tomoyuki Komai of the Natural History Museum and Institute, Chiba, Japan.
• ●The findings were published in the international journal Crustaceana.
• ●Alpheus vembanadi is named after the Vembanad backwaters; Alpheus hari honours Senior Professor M. Harikrishnan of CUSAT.
• ●Alpheus vembanadi is present in the Kochi backwaters throughout the year and survives salinity up to 31 ppt.
• ●Alpheus hari shows exceptional euryhaline tolerance, occurring in very low salinity and surviving freshwater in the laboratory.
• ●Pistol shrimps have one small pincer and one greatly enlarged snapper claw, which in some species is more than half the body length.
• ●Snapping the claw shut creates a cavitation bubble whose collapse produces a loud snap that stuns or kills prey — the shrimp does not grab or crush it.
• ●Hundreds of Alpheidae species are known worldwide, mostly from reefs and seagrass beds in temperate and tropical waters.

The newly described pistol shrimp species Alpheus vembanadi and Alpheus hari were discovered in the backwaters of which state?