Nesis was born in Moscow on 9 January 1934 to an intellectual family, his father was an architect and his mother was an economic geographer.
He eventually became the chief of the laboratory and carried our research on the benthic fauna of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, especially the taxonomy and ecology of various groups of these animals.
Between these tow periods in Murmansk Nesis enrolled at the Zoological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad.
From this body of work some 274 publications, including all six of his books, 142 scientific papers and 45 popular science articles, were about cephalopods.
[1] He was also an enthusiastic field biologist and he participated in over 30 research expeditions, both close to home in Russian waters and further afield in oceans around the world.
After each expedition he wrote an important contribution which advanced basic knowledge on the biology, taxonomy and faunal diversity of cephalopods of area studied during that voyage.