They are insanely good soft algae eaters, and brown diatoms are their speciality. They do provide a significant amount of legwork in the early days/ugly phase of new setups where soft algae begins to develop. I've personally had a small group of 4 decimate bad diatoms in a nano Dutch years ago, in a short 24 hours. Unfortunately after that they moved on to my AR Mini and my buce TC. They picked both clean of leaves entirely. At that point I had to move them to a different tank, and I haven't kept them since.
While they are excellent algae eaters, I think they're a little too hyped up in that aspect, only because they are very selective about filamentous algae, which is what the majority of people struggle with. Whether or not they eat hair algae seems to just be luck of the draw mixed with other available food options. They do work very well for post-algae cleanup, like if you are treating algae with peroxide or similar, they will take care of removing it once the cell structure is weakened which is very convenient. That being said, Neocaridina do the same for weakened algae and I would be more quick to reccomend Neocaridina if there are other livestock present because it can be hard to feed slow moving fish in certain setups because Amanos will definitely just snatch that sh*t and hide in a corner to horde it to themselves.
While they are excellent algae eaters, I think they're a little too hyped up in that aspect, only because they are very selective about filamentous algae, which is what the majority of people struggle with. Whether or not they eat hair algae seems to just be luck of the draw mixed with other available food options. They do work very well for post-algae cleanup, like if you are treating algae with peroxide or similar, they will take care of removing it once the cell structure is weakened which is very convenient. That being said, Neocaridina do the same for weakened algae and I would be more quick to reccomend Neocaridina if there are other livestock present because it can be hard to feed slow moving fish in certain setups because Amanos will definitely just snatch that sh*t and hide in a corner to horde it to themselves.
