Animal Mail Delivery

File these under "Not the Pony Express."

Two recent news items from afield:

Letter returned after 15 years - by fish

A letter that a young girl in Japan sent into the sky in a balloon some 15 years ago has been found on a fish hauled from 1,000 metres below the Pacific Ocean.

A fisherman found the still legible piece of paper sitting on a sticky flatfish in his catch on Thursday, along with a torn-off string and the fragment of a red balloon.

He opened the folded paper, discovering it was a handwritten letter from a six-year-old girl at an primary school in Kawasaki, 150 kilometres away from where the fish was caught off Choshi port.

The sender, Natsumi Shirahige, and her friends released letters as part of events to mark the school's 120th anniversary, which was in 1993.

Poland postal delivery as slow as snails

A Polish IT worker, who received a letter on January 3 that was sent on December 20 as priority mail, calculated that a snail would have made it even faster to his home than the letter.

Daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Michal Szybalski calculated that it took 294 hours for the letter to arrive at his home. He also said the distance between his home and the sender was 11.1 kilometres.

Given the distance and the time, the speed of the letter was 0.03775 kilometres per hour. Mr Szybalski calculated that a garden snail travels at around 0.048kph.