  When four species compete stochastically in a cyclic way, the formation of
two teams of mutually neutral partners is observed. In this paper we study
through numerical simulations the extinction processes that can take place in
this system both in the well mixed case as well as on different types of
lattices. The different routes to extinction are revealed by the probability
distribution of the domination time, i.e. the time needed for one team to fully
occupy the system. If swapping is allowed between neutral partners, then the
probability distribution is dominated by very long-lived states where a few
very large domains persist, each domain being occupied by a mix of individuals
from species that form one of the teams. Many aspects of the possible
extinction scenarios are lost when only considering averaged quantities as for
example the mean domination time.
