A few months ago my wife and I were recording video on a beech during a light rain, and it wasn't until afterwards we realized the foreground of the shot was full of live snails, and they were moving. So yeah - this was a somewhat similar experience for me!
Somehow while knowing that a) ‘sea snail’ was a concept, and b) beaches were strewn with sea shells, which involve various snail-reminiscent spirals, I failed to reach the stunning conclusion that the oceans are substantially inhabited by these kinds of characters:
But its true. And it seems that not only are the spiral-looking shells from snails, but various flat and non-spiral ones are too.
Little Mountain 5, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Alexandre Laporte, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Image: Malcolm Storey, BioImages - the Virtual Fieldguide (UK) through the Encyclopedia of Life and the creative commons CC BY-NC-SA license.
This is a meaningful update because snails are a particular kind of thing I’m familiar with, and furthermore I like them.