Vertebrates, including humans, need vitamin D for healthy bones. Humans must expose their skin to sunlight to synthesise certain types of vitamin D \u2013 if we are completely covered up with clothing, we risk not synthesising enough.<\/p>\n
But many vertebrates are covered in fur, wool or feathers, reducing their skin\u2019s exposure to sunlight.<\/p>\n
Some carnivores, including domestic dogs and cats, get most of their vitamin D through their diet. Other animals have an oily coating on their fur, wool or feathers, and this oil, when in contact with sunlight, makes vitamin D.<\/p>\n
And ring-tailed lemurs, are known to \u2018sunbathe\u2019, exposing the undersides of their limbs. <\/p>\n
While it has been suggested (and is a popularly-held belief) that these animals obtain vitamin D by grooming themselves and ingesting the oil, research on sheep, cows and birds indicates that they actually get the vast majority of their vitamin D by just standing in sunlight.<\/p>\n
The external oil is not an important source of the vitamin.<\/p>\n
So, it seems that a coat of wool, fur and feathers does not block sunlight in the same way that human clothes do, and that many animals manage to get a good dose of vitamin D by simply hanging out in the sunshine.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vertebrates, including humans, need vitamin D for healthy bones. Humans must expose their skin to sunlight to synthesise…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556778,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-556777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}