Extinction rate fragility in population dynamics

Population extinction is a rare event which requires overcoming an effective barrier. We show that the extinction rate can be fragile: a small change in the system parameters leads to an exponentially strong change of the rate, with the barrier height depending on the parameters nonanalytically. General conditions of the fragility are established. The fragility is found in one of the best-known models of epidemiology, the SIS model. The analytical expressions are compared with simulations.