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Legs are stretching out under the cool green canopy of plant life brought out by this strange, wet New Mexico spring.

Billions of legs.

They're attached to all sorts of creepy-crawlies - mosquitoes, moths, cicadas and ticks, for starters - that have come out to feed and breed.

And, in all likelihood, there will be even more legs in the coming weeks, possibly with a few diseases in tow, said Mark DiMenna, the city's environmental health supervisor.

"It's already gone from a few people complaining about a mosquito bite here and there to `Help! I'm getting eaten alive!' " DiMenna said. "With the continuing rain - especially in the next few weeks - it's going to get worse."

There haven't been many cases of West Nile disease in the past few years. But with mosquito populations that can spread the disease booming, that could easily change, DiMenna said.

"None of our samples (for West Nile) have come back positive so far," DiMenna said. "But we just started surveillance."

As the city continues to expand its mosquito sampling and control efforts, there are likely to be some areas where the threat of West Nile is very real, he said.

"This could be a decent year for it," DiMenna said. "It's been wet continuously all spring and mosquitoes have had a good foothold right off the bat."

Another pest spreading across the Duke City is the miller moth - the large, brownish-gray creatures fluttering around your light fixtures.

They're relatively harmless as moths, but their pre-moth stage as cutworms doesn't bode so well for the city's plants, said Joran Viers, a horticulture specialist for New Mexico State University.

"The caterpillars do a lot of damage," Viers said. "They feed on all kinds of things - vegetables, root crops, field crops, tomatoes, peas."

Mature plants can withstand attacks by cutworm caterpillars, but the worms cut stems underground on young plants - hence their name - and often kill them.

Viers suggests gardeners put empty toilet paper tubes around young plants, stuck about an inch in the soil, to block the cutworms' path.

The city could see even more moths in the next few weeks, followed by another storm of them in late summer, said David Thompson, associate professor of entomology at New Mexico State University.

"They migrate," Thompson said. "They come out generally on the eastern plains and fly through Albuquerque this time of year heading into the mountains."

The moths usually hang out at high elevation over the summer, then come back through the city as it cools off, he said.

The booming early-summer bug populations will also likely breed more bugs later in the summer, Thompson said.

"Certainly this is great weather for cockroaches and other things in the grass," Thompson said. "With excess insects you also get more spiders, and a lot of people aren't happy with that."

Black widows are just one type of spider that could do especially well this season, he added.

And if those creepy-crawlies aren't enough, one of the most repulsive of the multi-legged throngs appears to be gaining a mouth-hold in New Mexico - ticks.

"We normally, in the past, haven't given much thought to ticks," DiMenna said. "We had some situations last year with dogs coming home with dozens and dozens of ticks on them. It looks like some dogs died by tick exsanguination last year - they were literally bled to death by ticks."

Before last year, the most common complaints about ticks were one or two stuck to a dog's coat, so the larger populations are somewhat alarming, DiMenna said.

"Tick-borne disease hasn't been a big issue here, but if we're getting better survivorship, that will be an issue for us," he said. "We always tell people, if you're out hiking here, between ticks, fleas and mosquitoes, it's good to have insect repellent on."

Still, there are a few positives from the buggy outdoors. Bark beetle infestations that have done extensive damage to New Mexico's trees have dropped, Viers said.

If you like the noise, cicadas are also popping out of the ground right now and mating in large numbers, he said.

"They sing till they mate, then they mate like crazy and they die," Viers said. Until then, they're a good food source for birds, he said.

Praying mantis and butterfly numbers are also likely to rise as summer continues, Thompson said.

"There are several species of butterfly whose host plants are building up," Thompson said. "And praying mantises, the big green ones. Kids love those, and the mantises will be happier because they can eat all the other excess insects."