A crowd of children gripped the fence barricading them from a large pool of saltwater before a backdrop of small coastal houses, shuffling to get a glimpse of the open doorway from which the act of the hour would soon emerge. The much-anticipated personality turned out to be Gunnison, a 300-pound sea lion who is one of four pinnipeds recently brought back to the denverzoo Conservation Alliance after the completion of the zoo’s new, $19 million state-of-the-art sea lion habitat, which replaced the one that began housing the animals in 1987. “At that time, it was state-of-the-art, it was great, but they did not realize the importance of salt water for marine animals,” says Denver Zoo carnivore animal care specialist Meryt Schumacher. “Our facility needed to be renovated so that we could have salt water in all of our pools. Previously, our exhibit pools were freshwater, and our holding pools were manually salted by us.” ✍️ Read the full story by kfiorewrites at westword.com or at the l...