The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.
It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:
a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;
and
b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]
It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.
The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.
The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.
Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)