Welcome to a special roundup edition of the Nature podcast. I'm Benjamin Thompson.

So listeners, here we are in the last full week of 2018, and I thought that this was probably the right time to have a little look back at some of the stories we covered on the podcast this year.

But rather than pick these stories myself, I asked a few of our regular reporters to choose their favourite podcast piece and to tell us why they enjoyed making it.

Later in the show, you'll hear from Lizzie Gibney and Charmley Bundell, but first, Noah Baker tells us about his 2018 podcast highlight.

The piece that I've chosen is from back in June and it stuck with me, I think because

I got the opportunity to combine not only some really interesting science, but also some mystery

and quite a bit of culture as well, which I don't often get the chance to do or certainly don't

do as much as I'd like. So there was a study in nature plants which was investigating these ancient, bizarre,

gigantic trees called baobabs. And I love baobabs. I think they're really incredible things.

So that stuck out to me quite quickly when I saw the press release. But on reading the paper,

it became clear that from my perspective, there was a lot more than I might expect from a botany study. There was

scientific mystery as a very real and sometimes quite worrying consequence to what was being

said in the paper, which you'll hear in a minute. And reporting it took me in all kinds of directions.

So from the economic impacts of baobab trees through to the folklore surrounding them and the

importance of them to many African peoples to the folklore surrounding them and the importance of

them to many African peoples across the continent. And one of my contributors, witness,

Kanzanai, even recorded a song with his family on his phone and sent it to me via WhatsApp

and it ended up in the piece. It was a wonderful experience for me. I learned a lot and I hope you enjoy it.

Growing up would name Bobap trees after, you know, maybe after their shape, if it is too ugly, say this ugly one, if it produces a fruit, sweet fruit,

we'll say this one is sweet mama.

The Beobab's a completely unique tree in lots of respects.

Those sort of massive trees that are just about as wide as they're tall.

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