Patriot Energy Corporation (PGYC)

[P2O I'm from MO]

has been shorted 170,003 shares on Jan 15th 2009...On March 31, 2009 405,971 shares were shorted

Those numbers are the open short interest, not how many were shorted on the day you
looked at them. It varies from day to day.

You can short pennies. It's just very expensive to do it in the US. Check out Interactive Brokers.
The problem is you have to put up $2.50 per share to short even a .01 stock. Hardly worth
it since the interest to be made on that amount of 'collateral' cash would more than
likely make up for the profit to be gained on shorting the shares depending on how long
it takes to close out the short position.

Regards.