lpetrich
Contributor
Why we need vitamins:
We need a lot more vitamins than vitamin C, and we also need "essential" amino acids and "essential" fatty acids, those that our bodies cannot make.
The EAA's are arginine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine.
The EFA's are omega-3 and omega-6 ones.
I then checked across the animal kingdom for what I could find about nutritional needs, though I could find the most data for domestic and farmed and laboratory ones. Animals like rhesus monkeys, mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, horses, chickens, ...
Mice and rats need these vitamins: A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, D, K, and E, though they can make their own vitamin C - Importance of Vitamins in Human and Murine Diets | Taconic Biosciences
Research into chickens' nutritional needs: Effect of deficiencies of single essential amino acids on nitrogen and energy utilisation in chicks - PubMed
I found an article on feeding farmed fish and shrimp: THE NUTRITION AND FEEDING OF FARMED FISH AND SHRIMP - A TRAINING MANUAL 1. THE ESSENTIAL NUTRIENTS
I also found stuff on the laboratory fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster - the same EAA's, the same EFA's, and pretty much the same vitamins.
So needing EAA's, EFA's, and B vitamins, at least, is common over the animal kingdom.
But needing other vitamins is much more patchy. Needing vitamin C:
Heterotrophs outside of the animal kingdom, like fungi, sometimes need much less. The lab fungus Neurospora crassa needs only the B vitamin biotin, and the lab bacterium Escherichia coli does not need any. E. coli can use a variety of molecules as its sole carbon source: Gene Dispensability in Escherichia coli Grown in Thirty Different Carbon Environments | mBio and New insights into Escherichia coli metabolism: carbon scavenging, acetate metabolism and carbon recycling responses during growth on glycerol | Microbial Cell Factories | Full Text
We need a lot more vitamins than vitamin C, and we also need "essential" amino acids and "essential" fatty acids, those that our bodies cannot make.
The EAA's are arginine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine.
The EFA's are omega-3 and omega-6 ones.
I then checked across the animal kingdom for what I could find about nutritional needs, though I could find the most data for domestic and farmed and laboratory ones. Animals like rhesus monkeys, mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, horses, chickens, ...
Mice and rats need these vitamins: A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, D, K, and E, though they can make their own vitamin C - Importance of Vitamins in Human and Murine Diets | Taconic Biosciences
Research into chickens' nutritional needs: Effect of deficiencies of single essential amino acids on nitrogen and energy utilisation in chicks - PubMed
I found an article on feeding farmed fish and shrimp: THE NUTRITION AND FEEDING OF FARMED FISH AND SHRIMP - A TRAINING MANUAL 1. THE ESSENTIAL NUTRIENTS
I also found stuff on the laboratory fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster - the same EAA's, the same EFA's, and pretty much the same vitamins.
So needing EAA's, EFA's, and B vitamins, at least, is common over the animal kingdom.
But needing other vitamins is much more patchy. Needing vitamin C:
- Teleost fish (most present-day bony fish), though not other fish - 310 Mya
- Bats - 52 Mya
- Guinea pig, capybara
- Simians (Old World and New World monkeys, apes, and our species) - 42 Mya
- Some passeriform birds (typical sort of small bird)
Heterotrophs outside of the animal kingdom, like fungi, sometimes need much less. The lab fungus Neurospora crassa needs only the B vitamin biotin, and the lab bacterium Escherichia coli does not need any. E. coli can use a variety of molecules as its sole carbon source: Gene Dispensability in Escherichia coli Grown in Thirty Different Carbon Environments | mBio and New insights into Escherichia coli metabolism: carbon scavenging, acetate metabolism and carbon recycling responses during growth on glycerol | Microbial Cell Factories | Full Text