Effects of the metabolic load on the extinction times of the two-strain consortium. Normalized histograms of the extinction times for different values of ρ obtained from 500 simulations of the stochastic model from Eqs. (8)-(11) with N = 40 and ε = 0. Parameters are the same as in Fig. 4. Initial conditions are x1,i(0) = 100 proteins, i = 1, …, n1, x2,j(0) = 200 proteins, j = 1, …, n2, and initial population ratio is r(0) = 0.5.