Michael Engel is beginning his 15th year at KU as a professor and curator with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Michael Engel, a KU professor and curator, studies the origins of insects on the planet, and travels the world to gather insects and information that is studied by many. This collection of brightly colored orchid bees is just a sample of the many specimens housed in Engel's department.

Were an alien life form to look down on this planet from outer space, it wouldn’t see us as a planet of mammals scurrying about on two legs or four.

No, said Michael Engel, a Kansas University professor and senior curator with the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. Ours would be considered a planet of six-legged critters.

“It’s the most successful and persistent body plan,” he said, pointing out that insects have weathered multiple mass extinctions over more than 400 million years. “They all sail through untouched.”

Engel begins his 15th year with KU, immersed in studying the past, present and future of the life forms that encompass more than 50 percent of life on Earth. Engel, who holds a doctorate from Cornell University and is a full-time research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, also presides over one of the world’s foremost collections of bee specimens.

The plight of the honeybee’s seven species has lately drawn national attention in media and government alike. But Engel is as enamored with the other 19,993 (and counting) species of pollinators — including the brilliantly metallic-colored orchid bee and a species he helped discover in Asia that drinks human tears.

“I look at the general evolutionary history of bees,” he said. “I look at the past as an example of what to know about the future.”

Entire ecosystems depend on their pollinators, Engel said, and with many pollinators under threat, he said it is imperative to understand what’s afflicting them.

“They really keep this planet alive,” Engel said.

That’s a little more difficult in a field like entomology, Engel said, where fewer experts are tasked with studying wide swaths of insects — up to 180,000 species apiece. That’s opposed to ornithologists or mammalogists studying a little more than a dozen species apiece.

“It’s why many times people are shocked by what we still don’t know,” Engel said.

Engel said biologists are still discovering species at a rate with which they cannot keep up, even finding new species at locales thought to have been fastidiously researched.

“You just have to be at the right spot,” he said.

A flexible teaching schedule affords Engel just that opportunity, with up to a dozen trips each year to places such as Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Argentina and numerous stateside stops. But the university’s top-flight bee collection, Engel said, attracts far-flung visitors of its own, with researchers from Kenya and Chile among those who travel here to take a look.

That poses a problem for Engel, whose offices are housed within the university’s public safety building at 1501 Crestline Drive, west of campus. The department, and its specimens, moved there about eight years ago from its old home in Snow Hall. But passersby would be hard pressed to notice what is also inside the current building, what with public safety vehicles and the public safety’s office sign prominent. An 8-by-11 printout and a label on a door constitute the spare confirmation that Engel’s department is indeed inside the building.

“You’re not able to put your best foot forward,” he said.

Engel, whose research has been published in numerous academic journals, did point out one benefit of the move: the department was able to design its own storage facility, a climate-controlled, isolated warehouse that keeps its 5 million specimens undisturbed. The cool, 64-degree room with low humidity is ideal for the preserved insects and staves off any unwanted pests.

“We study insects, but we prefer they be dead,” Engel said.