Tropical reef fishes exhibit a large disparity of organismal morphologies contributing to their astonishing biodiversity. Morphological disparity, scaling from differences among individuals within populations to differences among species, is governed by ecological and evolutionary processes.

Here, we examined the relationship between intra- and interspecific disparity in 1111 individuals from 17 tropical reef fish species, representing 10 families with different dispersal abilities, across four Indian Ocean regions. We compared intraspecific measurements with species-level measures from a database of 1061 reef fish species. Species with high morphological disparity among individuals from distinct regions are found to be nested in families that display a high disparity among their genera. We show an association between the morphological disparity at the intra- and interspecific levels for several morphological ratios such as the caudal peduncle elongation. We evaluated the link between morphological disparity and genetic diversity with species dispersal ability. A structural equation model indicates that dispersal ability correlates positively with species genetic diversity, which is associated with morphological disparity.

Our results suggest that traits associated with dispersal may foster gene flow and morphological evolution. However, future works combining genomic, morphological and environmental data across more species is necessary to generalize these findings to other regions.