Competitive birth-death processes often exhibit an oscillatory behavior. We
investigate a particular case where the oscillation cycles are marginally
stable on the mean-field level. An iconic example of such a system is the
Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey competition. Fluctuation effects due to
discreteness of the populations destroy the mean-field stability and eventually
drive the system toward extinction of one or both species. We show that the
corresponding extinction time scales as a certain power-law of the population
sizes. This behavior should be contrasted with the extinction of models stable
in the mean-field approximation. In the latter case the extinction time scales
exponentially with size.Comment: 11 pages, 17 figure
