PORTLAND – The Portland Fish Exchange is continuing to lose money, officials said Monday, and the situation has gotten so bad that the human auctioneer will soon be giving way to a computer.

Landings at the 20-year-old display auction dipped to 660,000 pounds last month, or roughly half the amount that the exchange handled in November 2005.

Officials pinned much of the blame on the loss of Maine’s groundfishing boats to Massachusetts, where – unlike Maine – they are allowed to sell lobsters that wind up in their nets as “by-catch.”

“We have got to find a way to end trip diversion to Massachusetts,” said Tom Valleau, president of the exchange. “For the sake of a few lobsters, we are losing entire boatloads of groundfish. Maine’s traditional fishing industry is disappearing before our eyes and we as a state need to find more intelligent business practices before it is too late.”

Managers said the nonprofit exchange has lost money throughout 2006 and cash reserves are thin. The losses continue despite cost-cutting efforts, and officials early next year plan to replace the exchange auctioneer with a computer, ending a tradition of outcry auctioning of seafood in Portland.

Hank Soule, exchange manager, acknowledged that the departure of auctioneer Paul Dewey, who has presided at the daily sales through most of the exchange’s history, will change the character of the auction.

“The buyers are in the same room as the other buyers, and they see what the others are bidding. So you lose the interaction with them,” Soule said. “And, of course, you have sellers there, too.”

He said the computer will try to program some of the interaction, “but it’s not the same.”

The annual savings will include the auctioneer’s salary – “well into five figures” – and the computer program should pay for itself in a couple of years, Soule said.

He predicted that 2007 will be a critical year for the exchange and Maine’s groundfish industry in general.

“The attrition of boats to Massachusetts is only increasing as time goes on,” he said. “And as the industry goes, so goes the exchange.”

About 90 percent of Maine’s groundfish catch is sold on the Portland Fish Exchange, the nation’s only publicly owned nonprofit seafood auction.