We propose a hierarchical multi-scale attention mechanism-based model in response to the low accuracy and inefficient manual classification of existing oceanic biological image classification methods. Firstly, the hierarchical efficient multi-scale attention (H-EMA) module is designed for lightweight feature extraction, achieving outstanding performance at a relatively low cost. Secondly, an improved EfficientNetV2 block is used to integrate information from different scales better and enhance inter-layer message passing. Furthermore, introducing the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) enhances the model’s perception of critical features, optimizing its generalization ability. Lastly, Focal Loss is introduced to adjust the weights of complex samples to address the issue of imbalanced categories in the dataset, further improving the model’s performance. The model achieved 96.11% accuracy on the intertidal marine organism dataset of Nanji Islands and 84.78% accuracy on the CIFAR-100 dataset, demonstrating its strong generalization ability to meet the demands of oceanic biological image classification.