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:

land snail

But it’s true. And it seems that not only are the spiral-looking shells from snails, but various flat and non-spiral ones are too.

Abalone

Little Mountain 5, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Julia exquisita

Alexandre Laporte, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

snail

Image: Malcolm Storey, BioImages - the Virtual Fieldguide (UK) through the Encyclopedia of Life and the creative commons CC BY-NC-SA license.

Cowrie snail NOAA (Photo Collection of Dr. James P. McVey, NOAA Sea Grant Program), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This is a meaningful update because snails are a particular kind of thing I’m familiar with, and furthermore I like them.