[1] While crustaceans are the main food source of Sepia elegans, they also eat bony fish, as well as marine worms, such as Polychaeta.

[6] Sepia elegans occurs offshore on sandy and muddy substrates,[4] as deep as 500m but it is very rare at depth greater than 450m.

Like other cuttlefish it is an opportunistic predator and its main prey are molluscs, small crustaceans, fish and polychaete worms.

The newly hatched juveniles have a benthic habit and, in the Sicilian Channel estimated grow rates measured by the increase in mantle length was recorded as roughly 2.8mm a month for males and 3.0mm for females.

Females are usually heavier than males of similar mantle length and they have longer tentacular clubs and a greater weight of stomach contents.

In the eastern Mediterranean S. elegans adult individuals were smaller than those in the western part of the sea where lower productivity and higher temperatures cause the cuttlefish less metabolic cost.

The elegant cuttlefish are sexually dimorphic, the females have more body weight per given length, while males tend to be slightly larger in size.

In the Mediterranean Sea it can be an important species in local markets and it is fished for intensively in the Sicilian Channel whilein the south-western Adriatic it as bycatch in a multi-species trawl fishery together with Sepia orbignyana.

[3] The primary threat for all cuttlefish species is ocean acidification, which directly affects the density of the developing cuttlebone.

The higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is found to increase the density of a cuttlebone which then negatively affects the buoyancy of the cuttlefish.

A specific threat to Sepia elegans, is overfishing, especially in the Sicilian Channel where they are often used as a food source and their cuttlebones used for metal casting.