L-Ascorbic acid, also known as vitamin C, is a colorless, odorless, slightly acidic, water-soluble hexose derivative. It is an essential nutrient for animals, and plays an important role in promoting animal production performance and enhancing disease resistance. Studies have found that most aquatic animals cannot synthesize or have insufficient synthesis of vitamin C, and must ingest it from food. Although most mammalian livestock and poultry can synthesize vitamin C in the liver or kidney. However, when livestock and poultry are under stress conditions such as high temperature, transportation, and group transfer, and at the juvenile stage, adding vitamin C can stabilize and improve their production performance. Therefore, vitamin C has attracted attention and been widely used in animal production.
1. The importance of ascorbic acid in animal breeding
As we all know, vitamin C is an essential nutrient for the growth of various animals. It can not only improve the body's immunity, but also enhance the body's disease resistance. It is an essential substance for maintaining life and growth and development. Adult healthy livestock and poultry can synthesize vitamin C in the liver or kidney to meet their own nutritional needs. However, under stress conditions such as high temperature, high humidity, transportation, vaccination, disease, temperature mutation and transfer, and under the conditions of young or low ability of livestock and poultry, the body cannot fully synthesize vitamin C to meet its own needs. vitamin C must be supplemented in the diet. Otherwise, it will affect the normal physiological functions of the body, prone to symptoms such as anemia, bleeding, growth stagnation, easy stress, low fertilization rate and hatching rate.
Most of the artificially farmed fish and crustaceans cannot synthesize vitamin C from D-glucose due to the lack of L-gulonolactone oxidase activity in their bodies, so they must be ingested from food. When the amount of vitamin C in aquatic animals is insufficient, there will be metabolic disorders, decreased disease resistance, susceptibility to infectious diseases, decreased weight gain and feed conversion rate, increased mortality, slow wound healing, and blocked collagen formation. At the same time, aquatic animals have abnormal trunk cartilage development, vertebral deformation, gill bleeding, erosion, etc., which can easily cause bacterial and viral diseases in fish and shrimp. For aquatic animals, vitamin C is a very important vitamin that must be added in feed.
2. Application effect of ascorbic acid in breeding
Adding vitamin C to the chicken's diet has a good effect on improving the egg production rate, eggshell quality, feed utilization rate and weight gain of the chicken, as well as the fertilization and hatching rate of the breeder. Especially in chickens under high temperature, deprivation of water, fasting, immunization, disease, infection with parasites, malnutrition, poor ventilation, frightened, dense feeding or transportation and other stressful states and juvenile stages, the effect of adding vitamin C is significant.
Adding vitamin C in pig production also has a good effect on promoting the production performance of pigs. In addition, adding vitamin C to the diet can reduce the incidence of diarrhea in piglets. Adding 500-1000 mg/kg of vitamin C to boar feed can improve the quality and quantity of semen, thereby increasing the conception rate and litter rate of sows.
Adding vitamin C in aquaculture can improve the anti-stress and disease resistance of aquatic animals, and at the same time, it has obvious effects on promoting growth, promoting bone development, and increasing reproductive rate. Adding VC to bait can enhance the immune function of aquatic animals, thereby increasing their disease resistance. In addition, vitamin C can improve the ability of aquatic organisms to adapt to hypoxia and low temperature.