My experience with my first diatom bloom when I was starting my reef saw the diatoms in spots rather than a full tank carpet (on Caribsea aragonite) for a month and a half. I don't know if that was the end of my cycle and the diatoms were getting out competed for nutrients as I got my water chemistry dialed in, or if it was cut short by my CUC, in particular as
@TORX said, I got a sand sifting goby (sleeper gold head goby) and a bunch of nassarius snails, which both stir the sand bed.
The nassarius don't have a down side ime apart from occasionally being murdered by hermits for their shell, and the odd "bad batch" where one died and I had to fish it out to keep from spiking my ammonia, but a caveat for me was that the sleeper LOVES to bury stuff, at least it did when it was still digging its burrows. I would have to tip over LPS colonies and hold them in front of a low power pump to clear out all the rocks, and used a long coral feeding tube to blow the sand off hard or fixed coral. Now that it has settled in a home with my firefish, I can do the dusting of coral much less frequently. I also made sure to grab a batch of cope+roti pods so it wouldn't starve before it started taking prepared food. Now it's a pig with the rest of the fish and my 'pods are multiplying on their own, and my substrate produces most of the glare in my photos.
