They definitely can, the important parts are it being deep enough for hot/cold times of the year, natural food consistently in there for them to really thrive and reproduce, and protecting them from predators. Also it’s important that if the water isn’t constantly coming in and out fast, that you don’t put too much trout or have them reproduce so fast that they use up all the oxygen and then they suffocate. I’ve worked with my neighbor on raising brook trout and Atlantic salmon on some differnt sized ponds on his property. There is crawfish and minnows reproducing in those ponds and the fish eat those as well as bugs that come to the top of the water. If you hook a light up right above the water at night it will bring a lot of bugs to the water and the fish pop up and eat them from the surface. My neighbor has a big spring on his property that is constantly lots of moving water, we set up tanks for when the trout/salmon are babies before putting them in the bigger reservoirs where they’ll get eaten that small. The water naturally moves in and out of these tanks and we cover them with heavy metal screens while we’re not there because lots of animals around here will come and eat them right out. Before I was doing it with him he had a mink come and clean out all the baby fish when it wasn’t properly covered. Here’s some pics of those tanks and also a picture of a load of minnows he got, we put a net connected to pvc pipes in the water and had the minnows dropped off their it held them well so we could separate some into other bodies of water.
